This is just too rich not to post. Pierce, who has been consistent in describing Ryan as a "zombie-eyed granny-starver," has a post over at esquire.com on the Romney veep-pick. This is required reading, because yes, eviscerates.
Below the great orange divider, please, for an array of blockquotes. Pierce is, as they say, on fire.
Pierce rehearses his complaints about the Ryan budget, about Romney's deceptive campaign
If he'd even hinted that he agreed with a fraction of a smidgen of a portion of the policies on which Ryan has built his career, Romney would have been hanging from the Sacred Cod by the middle of 2005.
about our craven media (he reports that, in a taped CNN piece, Gloria Borger mused about whether to invite Ryan to the prom) which has been discussing Ryan's "genius." Yes, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. More evidence of this in
Ryan Lizza's piece on Ryan in the New Yorker.
But that's just a warm up. Here's the paragraph that sent me to the diary area:
Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he's ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.
Yep. Go ahead and deny your fealty to Ayn Rand all you want, Paul. We know that you're cribbing your budget from the budgeting gospel according to Alan Greenspan, and we know that Greenspan was a member of Rand's inner circle.
In Jed Lewison's continuing coverage of the selection, he notes that the Romney camp has already tried to distance itself from the Ryan budget, saying
Of course they [Romney and Ryan] aren’t going to have the same view on every issue. But they both share the view that this election is a choice about two fundamentally different paths for this country.
Of course, the Ryan budget can serve as a lighting rod to redirect the chatter away from Romney's taxes, but if that's what this is for, it's a very cynical means of saying that the media can only focus on one political issue at a time (possibly correct, but let's be optimistic). As far as helpful to the campaign goes, I'll just link to
blue aardvark's reading of Nate Silver's comments on the subject. Short version of that? Well, not really at all.
Another gift that keeps on giving from the Romney camp. I just hope we use all of them effectively.
8:42 AM PT: And more from Pierce: "he's a guy pretending to be something he's not, and doing so back in Janesville in a very swell Georgian mansion, which just happens to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Which, among other things, means that Paul Ryan, who lies awake at night worrying that The Deficit will come and eat our grandchildren, lives in a house overseen by the National Park Service, which means that he qualifies for a 20-percent investment tax credit for the house he lives in."
HYPOCRITE!
9:36 AM PT: Thanks for the Rec List! I'm off to the library now, and I should be back in about 90 minutes.