This will not be a long diary as I am working this morning...but I did not wanted to get other folks' response to my impression of the Paul Ryan response to President Obama's budget outline yesterday.
In a nutshell, I see this response as consistent with other historic GOP responses (at least in my lifetime) to articulate, intelligent, well-reasoned push back to their "arguments." They seem to respond as schoolyard bullies often do to pushback...they cave and pout.
Let's look for a moment at some of the venues in which P. Ryan had the opportunity to respond to the speech. In his Fox response, basically the first thing he said is: "What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander in chief. What we heard today is a political broadside from our campaigner in chief.” So his first complaint against this proposal, which substantively was quite different that his own, had nothing to do with substance.
Even better, though was his response on Kudlow later in the evening: "Look, I will just tell you, Larry, I really was lead to believe that this was going to be more of an olive branch speech. That the president was going to move toward us, offer us some ideas where we can agree and work together on, like, social security and other areas. We didn't get any of that, instead of getting a speech from a leader, from our commander-in-chief on some constructive path forward on deficit reduction, we got a partisan gauntlet from the campaigner-in-chief." Again, his first complaint was not against the substance, but about getting his feelings hurt about the extent to which he was not met half-way.
Does this remind anyone of Newt Gingrich blowing all of the GOP political capital on getting his feelings hurt by President Clinton by not being show enough deference (in Newt's opinion) in Air Force 1 seating? I don't know whether President Clinton was shrewd enough to have made that decision explicitly for that effect, but perhaps we have a strategic model to tap against GOP leadership.