I don't want it and you can't have it!
It was only a matter of time before right wingers launched an all-out
assault on Paul Ryan as too liberal. He did, after all, forge that compromise (what?!) with Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat (gasp!), in 2013 to keep the government open (for shame!). And quick as lightnin', the radical right is
on to him.
For America’s Brent Bozell issued a preemptive denunciation of Ryan on Monday. “How can someone with an ‘F’ conservative rating (Conservative Review) be acceptable to conservatives?” he said in a statement to National Review. “Paul Ryan came to Washington with such promise and has been a huge disappointment. At every turn he has done the bidding of John Boehner. He hasn’t taken a principled stand on a single thing of importance. He is just more of the same, sadly.”
That marks a reversal from the halcyon days of 2011, when Bozell and a chorus of other conservatives attacked then-presidential candidate Newt Gingrich for criticizing Ryan’s proposed budgetary reforms.
Ryan's main sin was working to keep the government open and pushing a vote on immigration reform. That's just too much,
even though:
As Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan was the author of plans that would convert Medicare into something akin to a voucher plan, where seniors would get government subsidies to purchase private insurance and move away from government-run health care.
He also wanted to turn Medicaid into increasingly tight block grants to state governments, and he also called for drastic cuts in food stamps, Pell grants and many other domestic programs.
Apparently, trying cut a ginormous hole in the safety net for America's most vulnerable isn't enough to earn a guy some goodwill in the Republican Party anymore.
Just yesterday, the GOP was in the clouds—dreaming up scenarios where Ryan might become the "consensus" candidate for speaker. Now the Drudge Report is tearing him to shreds fifteen different ways and Fox's Sean Hannity is calling him "one of the nicest men you’ll ever meet" but encouraging the "Freedom Caucus" to dump him. And as everyone awaits word from Ryan, who has pretty much said incessantly that he doesn't want the job, the people who do, like Rep. Bill Flores of Texas, are just waiting in the wings.
So the guy who professes that he doesn't want the job has a got a chokehold on it while America waits for a government that can govern.