It's been a while. My reader(s) might have thought that I got out of the game. I can assure you, I'm on it. Sadly, the post-Giffords opinion world has been a wasteland of semi-rational thought and unmockable drivel. That is, until Katrina vanden Heuvel came along. Oh, I brought along my friend. I call him the Heckler Inside My Head. Now you get three concurrent voices, two of which just happen to be me. I fear that shrinks will look back on this post when they commit me and say to themselves "So that's where it started."
Paul Ryan's State of the Union response
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Republicans have chosen Rep. Paul Ryan, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, to respond to the president's State of the Union address tonight.
A good choice. Ryan is widely considered the leading expert in all things budgetary on Capitol Hill and took President Obama to task during the health care debate. While Ryan maintains his credibility as a deficit hawk, he did also give a yes vote to TARP and the auto bailout. Did he think these votes would ingratiate him with the left? If so, shame on him and his Chief of Staff, both of whom should know better. I generally mancrush pretty hard over Paul Ryan, so I’m willing to give him a pass since he appears to have found Reagan. (See what I did there? It’s a play on finding Jesus. Blasphemer. No, heckler inside my head, it’s not sacrilegious. There’s nothing sacred about syntax.)
Also this whole sordid circus isn’t about the State of the Union anymore. It’s “Date Night.” Great! I love Tina Fey. Stop it, HIMH. The imagery of Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk sharing a Coke with two straws is not an invitation for your hip pop-culture references or snide jabs, no matter how apt and hilarious they may be. It just makes me queasy. Plus Tina Fey is adorable. Lay off.
In the civility intermission that has followed the assassination attempt against Rep. Gabby Giffords just outside Tucson
Of course, now two weeks after the fact, the paper foot soldiers of the left have given up the overt attempts to link the right to the shooting, and instead settled for the innuendo of association.
and sorrowful that he must dissent from the president's course.
Messaging note for the left: when supporting a guy that plays as much golf as Obama, veer away from words and phrases like “course,” “stroke,” and “tee up.”
Don't be fooled.
Ryan is an Ayn Rand-quoting zealot,
Is it possible to be a zealot of an ideology based on the elevation of the individual and the glorification of an ideal called “egoism?” If so, it would appear to be missing the point.
one of the Republican Party's self-styled "Young Guns."
More of the rhetoric that nearly killed Gabrielle Giffords. You bastards.
He's spent his adult life inside the Beltway,
Which puts him in the company of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, every Kennedy born since 1930, the entire staff of the Washington
on the political right, with no experience in the world of business, labor, the executive branch or the private sector
Which puts him in the company of Barack Obama.
Incubated in a right-wing think tank,
Interesting tact: dehumanizing the opponent. I’m pretty sure it’s not civil though.
writing speeches for Jack Kemp and William Bennett, he was elected to Congress at age 28. Ryan became the most loyal of loyal foot soldiers
Remember: civility. We don’t want our language to evoke hatred or martial concepts.
in the Congress presided over by Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert, a fact Ryan now glosses over as he describes those Congresses as "corrupt."
Which they indisputably were, at least when you don’t look at them compared to the 110th and 111th Congresses. That’s a fragment. I know, okay. I’m trying to cultivate a casual and conversant writing style when interrupting someone else’s work. It helps the flow for the reader for my intermissions to actually sound like vocalized objections. This really impugns your moral authority to correct grammar, you know. I hate you.
Ryan has been dubbed a Republican "thinker" by national reporters desperate to find someone they can praise in a party that was extreme before the Tea Partyers came to town.
...This is the party that ran John McCain in 2008. The Republican Party never operated in the fringes. In fact, the reason that Bush’s late-presidency poll numbers were so low is because he lost his conservative base.
But, in fact, his rhetoric is a barely varnished echo of the ravings of Glenn Beck.
I’ve never been able to understand the glaring like of omission perpetuated by the left with regards to conservative commentators. If Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and numerous other right-wing voices are extremist ravings, then how are they so much more successful than their liberal counterparts?
He accuses Obama of a "treacherous plan,"
Boy some context would be both helpful and accepted journalistic practice.
saying that Democrats have a "hardcore-left agenda,"
Again, without context those three words are completely meaningless.
and claims that Democrats are steering the country "very far left, very fast"
Kimono. Missouri
- a direction he describes as "completely antithetical to what this country is about."
Which is undeniably true. Obama has been very successful in enacting his agenda, but the reason for the massive conservative resurgence last year was the discomfort of that lurch to the left. From a purely nonpartisan position, if Ryan didn’t believe that the President’s agenda was wrong, then why would he oppose it? Political ideology is not a dirty and bitter thing. It represents our attempts to synthesize the lessons of economics, history, and philosophy in a universal compact between men. In short, if Ryan didn’t believe that Obama had overstepped the limited role of government as envisioned by the Founders, he wouldn’t be a conservative.
This sort of rhetoric, once scorned as sophomoric at best,
Only by the miserable dullards of left that were busy trying to smear the Tea Party. Another fragment. Shove it. Don’t think that by using poor sentence construction and invoking an implied subject that your grammar isn’t any less ghastly. You just used another implied subject yourself! Touche. Another Fragment!
::Error: Infinite Loop::
is now common currency
Rhetoric is not currency. No wonder the left always botches monetary policy.
on the Republican right. While Ryan will be careful to avoid such language in the GOP response to the State of the Union , he'll reveal his ideological zealotry
That’s the second time already you’ve used that word. Technically she used the form “zealot” before.
in the policies he will propose.
Most of those policies will come from Ryan's "Roadmap for America
AKA: the left-wing hack that was responsible for “JournoList” and a former Dean campaign worker. Also of note, Klein vindictively stated that Senator Joe Lieberman’s opposition to the Health Care bill meant that "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score." Hey, you just got all of that off of Wikipedia. What can I say; I’m a lazy researcher.
aptly described as "nothing short of violent."
Careful now; we all want to be civil.
In a nation where the top 1 percent already captures 25 percent of the nation's income and possesses more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, the roadmap would give the richest households a new round of staggering tax cuts. It would reduce tax rates, eliminate taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest, and abolish the corporate tax, the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax.
The respected Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, drawing on estimates of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center
Okay, I just let her rant for two paragraphs. Let’s all catch our breath. … You can’t simulate breathing with an ellipsis. It’s a literary device to assist the pacing of the reader. Tell yourself whatever you want, Chief. To me it just looks like sloppy writing.
Anyways, I reject the premise that income parity should be a stated goal of the United States United States
Some of this revenue would be replaced by a value-added tax
Booooo VAT Tax! BOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Booooo!
that would raise the cost of every good Americans buy, ensuring that middle-income people would pay far more in taxes than they do now.
Actually, consumption-based taxes like the VAT disproportionately impact high-income consumers, you illiterate hag.
Some would be made up by drastic cuts in health-care spending. Ryan's giveaway to the rich would also drive up federal deficits and debt.
You can’t simultaneously criticize Ryan for wanting spending reductions and make a deficit-related objection to tax cuts in a stagnant economy. I don’t care what Paul Krugman says. Did I just say something? No, that italicization was only for emphasis.
Understanding the purpose of the "roadmap" is key to understanding Ryan.
So you’re telling me you understand Ryan? Great. This should be some very insightful commentary.
When he speaks of "fiscal responsibility," what he really means is that middle-class and working Americans will shoulder the responsibility of tackling debts and deficits, while multinational corporations and financial institutions will reap the benefits of favorable government policies and taxpayer-funded bailouts.
…
I believe you said something earlier about echoes and ravings? This is pure insanity. Paul Ryan is from Wisconsin Wisconsin Wisconsin America
His plan would unravel employer-based health care by ending the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance.
Under this plan, health insurance providers would be forced to sell insurance like car insurance providers. Consumers would naturally rearrange themselves into plans through market-based mechanisms, thereby providing a larger risk pool for insurers to draw from. This, in turn, would reduce costs and give consumers more control over their plans. This is a bad thing?
It would eliminate traditional Medicare, eviscerate Medicaid, and terminate the Children's Health Insurance Program. These would be replaced by a voucher system designed to lose value over time.
This is called weaning.
Ryan would also use "price indexing" to slash average Social Security benefits by 16 percent for those retiring in 2050
Just in case you’re 23 years old and still dumb enough to believe that you’ll actually draw from Social Security.
and 28 percent in 2080.
Just in case you’re 23 years old and want to have a baby dumb enough to believe that it will actually draw from Social Security. That’s the great part about believing that the unborn still deserve human dignity; you get to insult and mock fetuses. You’re sick.
As head of the House Budget Committee - accorded what House Speaker John Boehner calls "stunning and unprecedented" power to shape the budget - Ryan is leading the GOP's charge to cut $100 billion out of "non-security discretionary spending" this year - requiring cuts of 20 percent in everything from the FBI to cancer research, Pell grants for students, Head Start and grants to public school districts.
Even a cadre of ill-placed dashes to avoid a comma splice can’t make this sentence readable. You’ve got some stones to bring up grammar. Let’s count: three dashes, two commas, and a stunning 67 words. Katrina vanden Heuvel, this sentence is a glittering monument to your colossal ineptitude as a writer.
Oh, and besides being a grammatical clusterfuck, it’s also politically shallow. What ever happened to “elections have consequences?” Republicans campaigned on fiscal responsibility and won in a landslide. Far from being fringe, these cuts are an electoral mandate.
This is a recipe, given the country's faltering growth, for increasing unemployment and misery.
Please, PLEASE stop reading Paul Krugman. I can’t deal with refuting his particular brand of economic nonsense more than once a week.
Ryan, of course, refuses to identify which programs would be cut,
Does it really matter? Let’s start with the ones that you thought would be disasterous to cut: the FBI, cancer research, Pell Grants, and Head Start. The FBI’s mandate has been slashed with the emergence of DHS, so its budget should also be cut. Cancer research should be entirely private-sector. No one needs Pell Grants when student loans are universally available and the country faces a shortage of technically skilled workers (like welders or electricians). Finally, Head Start is little more than a Kindergarten class for disengaged parents. Have you managed to piss everyone off yet? I haven’t insulted midgets yet.
or how deep the damage would be.
When sane people say “what’s the damage,” the damage refers to a high cost. When liberals say “what’s the damage” the damager refers to lower cost. Yet another way that the left’s entire world view is skewed so far it’s backwards.
"I'm a budgeteer," Ryan says. "I just bring down the cap" - an utterly irresponsible description of budgeting, which is entirely a question of choosing priorities.
No, budgeting is entirely a question of scope and necessity. Cutting a program doesn’t mean that its goals are not a priority. We could make Ryan’s $100B of cuts simply by scaling back programs that have failed.
As a career politician steeped in the art of "framing" a poll-tested, focus-grouped message to make it palatable,
Read: he’s plastic and fake. He’s playing you. He wants your money. Project much, KVH? Don’t start giving Katrina vanden Heuvel cute little nicknames. Sorry.
Ryan will no doubt sound reasonable,
That nerve of this Ryan guy!
invoking basic American values,
That bastard!
promising that jobs,
That crosses the line.
growth and opportunity will result if only we adopt his priorities.
Son of a bitch!
But don't just listen to State of the Union platitudes. Consider the record and the proposed policies. Beneath that shock of unruly hair
Because we all know that the quality of the hair is the true measure of the quality of the politician.
is an ideologue with extreme notions
Again, this horse-faced trollop believed that the party that nominated John McCain was ideological and extreme.
that, if adopted, would endanger our future, and leave most Americans far worse off.
Her choice of words fascinates me. By denouncing Rand , vanden Heuvel is establishing herself as the voice for the collective. Yet here, when she makes her summation, she uses the language of rand. Instead of saying that the American People would be worse off, KVH…Ugh…instead opts to talk about American people individually. “Most Americans would be worse off” instead of “the American People would be worse off.” The difference is that vanden Heuvel regards this as a divided country. She appears to believe that the ties of nationhood are less binding than the ties of social class.
This, Ms. Vanden Heuvel, is why the American people call liberals socialists. This is why we know you to be extreme.
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