How nice of the New York Times to start their latest
front-page Republican
hit piece, this time against House Budget Committee Chairman
Paul Ryan, by describing him as something like an anarchist, OCD,
catfish-grabbing redneck cult leader, with other Republicans
following his “marching orders” to destroy America’s entitlement
systems.
In case you weren’t sure of the laugh-out-loud bias of
Times reporter Jonathan Weisman, get a load of this
belly-slapper: “[Ryan] also strongly favors a repeal of President
Obama’s health
care law, even though his own prescriptions for Medicare…are
similar to the Obama plan’s for insurance expansion.”
Meanwhile, the House Budget Committee’s website has a detailed
page
on the differences between the Ryan “Path to Prosperity” and the
Obama path to entitlement insolvency.
A GOP aide, responding to The American Spectator’s
inquiry, offered this: “The contrast between the two approaches
couldn’t be clearer - the President’s health care law puts 15
unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of Medicare through
the Independent Payment Advisory Board; the House-passed Path to
Prosperity empowers 50 million seniors by making them and their
doctors the nucleus of the health care system. True choice and
competition is incompatible with a centralized government agency
setting prices.”
Ryan’s September, 2011
speech at the Hoover Institution also makes plain that his view
of rational health care policy could not be more different from
Obama’s.
But the facts be damned! I have a story to tell, and it includes
catfish and weight-lifting and Lunchables!
Apparently, it is also “not…clear whether [Ryan] has in interest
in compromising or whether his sole goal is a Republican victory
that is sweeping enough to enact his own vision.”
So, Paul Ryan is, according to Mr. Weisman, not just a wannabe
Olympic weight-lifter and political version of David Koresh, but
also a tyrannically-oriented narcissist. One can’t help but wonder
whether Weisman noticed that his description of a single-minded
focus on winning fits the current resident of the White House to
perfection.
Weisman continues on this line about Ryan: “He does not drive
stakes into the ground, he said, but he also made clear that
compromise should come on his terms.”
Anyone remember Nancy Pelosi? From Roll Call
magazine in January, 2009: “Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) parried
GOP assaults on Democrats’ $825 billion stimulus package Thursday
and refused to slow the bill down to give more time for Republican
input. ‘Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes we won the election, but that
doesn’t mean we don’t want sustainability or Republican support,’
Pelosi said. “
Anyone remember Barack Obama’s
plea to Hispanic voters in 2010 to “punish our enemies”?
So much for Democratic “compromise.”
Back to the cult leader characterization: when talking about
Paul Ryan’s vote against the Simpson-Bowles Commission plan,
Weisman says Ryan “voted no, taking every House Republican on the
panel with him and preventing the guarantee of a vote in Congress.”
But of the seven commission members who
voted against the plan, four were Democrats, including two of
the three Democrat members of the House represented on the
Commission. (In other words, Jonathan, in case your math skills are
as challenged as your reporting skills, the majority of
House Democrats on the commission voted against the plan, and the
majority of votes against the plan came from Democratic
commission members.)
In March of this year, when Congressman Jim Cooper (D-TN)
offered an amendment to the Ryan Budget which would have “utilized
Simpson-Bowles recommendations for establishment of the budget for
FY 2013 and to set forth the appropriate budgetary levels for FY
2014 through FY 2022,” the measure failed on a vote
of 38-382, with only 22 Democrats voting in favor.
Then Weisman gets (even more) personal, noting with obvious
disbelief that “those who know [Paul Ryan] cannot seem to dislike
him.” The evidence he offers for such goodwill toward Ryan is a
scathing attack from former Congressman David Obey (D-WI)
who says that Ryan is “oblivious…to the pain his policies would
cause people.”
Of course Mr. Weisman, being the good liberal that he is, buys
into the liberals’ notion that the actual results of
redistributionist government policy must be ignored; it is only the
Nanny Statists’ claimed Big Rock Candy
Mountain intentions that matter. And those Republicans are just
so damn mean…the repeatedly-demonstrated positive
results of such things as tax cuts, welfare reform,
airline deregulation — and the concomitant failed “we’re doomed”
predictions by Democrats every time — notwithstanding.
It’s not just Ryan who Weisman targets. He describes the work of
Nobel laureate Friedrich
Hayek as “bootstrap economics.” However, Hayek was not wildly
opposed to a limited welfare state, but rather to the intrusions on
freedom that such a state was morphing into.
From his 1960 book “The Constitution of Liberty”: “…we must
recognize that, as a service agency, [the state] may assist without
harm in the achievement of desirable aims which perhaps could not
be achieved otherwise.” (Hayek goes on to explain that “many of the
new welfare activities of the government are a threat to freedom”
is because “they really constitute an exercise of the coercive
powers of government and rest on its claiming exclusive rights in
certain fields.”)
But of course, Weisman wouldn’t know any of this because Hayek
is to Weisman what zombies are to my four year-old son: a mythical
creature to be hated and feared, understood only through horror
films or their political equivalent. And unlike President Obama who
got his Nobel Prize for a result to be named later, Hayek actually
made a lasting and positive impact — not just on Paul Ryan but on
humanity itself.
And then it’s back to the ultra-fit knuckle-dragging cult leader
that is Paul Ryan: “Among Republicans in and outside Mr. Ryan’s
immediate circle, the admiration verges on infatuation. They gush
about his athleticism… They laud his bowhunting…”
Even the DailyKos wouldn’t allow “reporting” as
juvenile and unprofessional as this. Well, they probably would,
though I doubt such schlock would get past your local high school
newspaper’s editor.
But Weisman saves the most damning charge for last: Paul Ryan,
the Great White Hope of the GOP, is a barefaced liar. Yes, it’s
true. The wailing and gnashing of teeth can be heard in country
clubs across America. To wit:
Ryan claims that “he never drove the Oscar Mayer
Weinermobile.” But in a bit of investigative reporting sure to
garner the admiration the Pulitzer committee, we learn that “As for
the Wienermobile, one summer as he was pressing Oscar Mayer
Lunchables and turkey bacon on meat buyers in rural Minnesota, two
‘very nice young ladies’ who were driving the hotdog-shaped vehicle
did let him ‘take it for a spin,’ he confessed.” How he got that
out of Ryan without training by the CIA in enhanced interrogation
techniques will ever be one of the great questions of modern
journalism.
And there we have it: Paul Ryan’s political future, done in by
luncheon meats and the intrepid reporting of Jonathan Weisman.
