I suppose when you (I'm using the second person on purpose, because it's not just me) start thinking about parasites and predators in regard to human beings, the effort to be more precise leads to cannibalism of the real and vicarious kind. And, when you get to vicarious cannibalism, the Catholic Mass springs to mind since the consumption of the body and blood of Christ was indubitably vicarious, even though the prelates insist on calling it real. Whether or not it was/is real, the priest intoning "hoc est corpus" hardly registered with the attendees at a Latin Mass. However, when you start reflecting on humans exploiting other humans to the point of destruction, albeit vicarious cannibalism (consuming money instead of bread and wine), and the web of euphemisms employed to hide it, then it's probably inevitable that you end up with "hocus pocus" on the mind.
The reason I can say it's not just me is because when I went to check the Google to see where "hocus pocus" stands, up popped a three day old comment from none other than Paul Krugman in the New York Times. "Hocus pocus" had also made an appearance in his brain, perhaps called up as an almost inevitable response to Lyin' Ryan's saturation of the ether. That it surfaced recently is, I would suggest, evidenced by it's usage in the title, "Focus Hocus Pocus, Redux," for an old thought. Old wine in new bottle.
At first, I was reluctant to even read the post, lest it interfere with my own suggestion that Hocus Pocus Ryan might well be a more accurate moniker for Willard's Vice. But, no worry. Krugman's connection to the word "focus," suggests mostly an attraction to the alliterative association, since he has not yet identified why he perceives the call to "focus" as a problem.
The whole focus on “focus” is, as I see it, an act of intellectual cowardice — a way to criticize President Obama’s record without explaining what you would have done differently.
I wouldn't call it cowardice, more an perceptual handicap. If people are fixated on focus, it's likely because their perception of reality is restricted to what can be easily seen. They have to rely on superficial optics as their only source of information, because their other sensors are for some reason not engaged with their brains. They don't hear well or sniff well, have no taste and are out of touch. So, they have to rely on what they see and, since "appearances are deceiving," what they perceive is often wrong. It makes sense to conclude that perhaps, if they focused, they'd see better.
While Lyin' Ryan may well be one of the sense-deprived, he may have acquired his blatant disregard for reality in his religion's acceptance of the substitution of the imagined for the real. Or, it's possible that people who can't tell the difference between their ideas and the real world are attracted to the Catholic vicarage as a formal representation of their own muddled perceptions of their world. "Hocus pocus," a vulgar rendition of "hoc est corpus" (this is the body) is meant to imply trickery and deceit or, more innocently, magic tricks, more to amuse than deceive. Catholics take umbrage that their belief in transubstantiation is fanciful. But, considering that all matter is one, if one disregards the element of time, which the human brain is quite capable of doing, then the symbolic recreation and consumption of the sacrificial lamb isn't really a mystery. Nor should the vicarious cannibalism come as a surprise. The only thing that's distressing is that the vicarious has not succeeded in replacing the real. And that we've not yet figured out how to compensate the victims, whose injuries are quite real.
You see, the real life consequences of the vicarious cannibalism practice on Wall Street and around the globe by the financial engineers simply aren't being mitigated, despite the fact that the instruments of destruction, money and the law, are ours to retrieve and restore to their rightful owners. We can take the money back. It's not magic.