Whenever anyone talks about cutting government spending — or even, as is more often the case, slightly slowing its rate of growth — they face the wildest accusations. Think Newt Gingrich and the orphanages, the millions of children who were going to die in the streets after welfare reform, the homelessness allegedly created by Reagan during the Decade of Greed.
Here is your most unhinged attack of the day, brought to you by Esquire:
Make no mistake. In his decision to make Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, his running mate, Romney finally surrendered the tattered remnants of his soul not only to the extreme base of his party, but also to extremist economic policies, and to an extremist view of the country he seeks to lead. This is unimaginable to those of us who lived here under Romney’s barely perceptible stewardship of the Commonwealth (God save it!).
The headline? “Paul Ryan: murderer of opportunity, political coward, candidate for vice president of the United States.”
UPDATE: Via Jeremy Lott, here is the runner-up:
Ryan is the way Romney and his aides escape blame for their now-likely defeat—blame which would have vicious and unrelenting—and pin it in on conservatives instead. With only minor historical revisions, they will be able to tell a story about how Romney was keeping the race close through early August, at which point the party’s conservative darling joined the ticket and sent the poll numbers into steady decline.
Now I don’t dispute that this is how the Romneyites and moderate Republicans will spin a Romney-Ryan defeat. But the idea that a man as ambitious as Romney is already at this early stage planning on spinning his defeat and is going to spend grueling months on the campaign trail — having already spent vast sums of his personal fortune — on a doomed campaign doesn’t pass the laugh test.
