Leave it to Matt Taibbi to rip apart who he calls one of the "young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres" who is in a good position to drown the government in a bathtub, just as his handlers Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers desire.
The rest of us can go die for all he cares:
Every few years or so, the Republicans trot out one of these little whippersnappers, who offer proposals to hack away at the federal budget. Each successive whippersnapper inevitably tries, rhetorically, to out-mean the previous one, and their proposals are inevitably couched as the boldest and most ambitious deficit-reduction plans ever seen. Each time, we are told that these plans mark the end of the budgetary reign of terror long ago imposed by the entitlement system begun by FDR and furthered by LBJ.
Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.
The reason for this is always the same: the Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.
...
The absurd thing is that Ryan’s act isn’t even politically courageous. It’s canny calculation, but courage it is not. It would be courageous if Ryan were, say, the president of the United States, and leaning on that budget with his full might. But Ryan is proposing a budget he knows would have no chance of passing in the Senate. He is simply playing out a part, a non-candidate for the presidency pushing a rhetorical flank for an out-of-power party leading into a presidential campaign year. If the budget is a hit with the public, the 2012 Republican candidate can run on it. If it isn’t, the Republican candidate can triangulate Ryan’s ass back into the obscurity from whence it came, and be done with him.
I'd prefer not to take a chance on the pair just in the event they actually DO carry out the extremism they run on.
We should know it is up to the "third way" "Democrats" like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to do the dirty work the Republicans talk about but rarely enact. It's been mentioned many times it took Nixon to go to China, but it took Clinton to enact "welfare reform" as a way to "triangulate" his opponents.
It's disastrous shit for Democrats to pull.
Speaking of Ryan's idol, the most destructive thing about Rand was her disciple Alan Greenspan.
He was totally brainwashed by her "philosophy," but unfortunately he was put in a position in government where he gambled with millions of lives with his anti-regulation nonsense.
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