Tag Archives: Paul Ryan

Conventional wisdom holds that the Republican ticket’s landslide electoral loss in last year’s presidential voting was mostly Mitt Romney’s fault, and I agree with that.

I don’t agree, however, with any notion that vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan wasn’t a factor in his party’s defeat.

Ask yourself this question: If Ryan had been the party’s presidential nominee, would the ticket have fared any better at the ballot box? Highly doubtful, I would think. Such a situation would have cast an even brighter spotlight on Ryan’s crackpot fiscal nostrums and his scheme to end Medicare as we know it.

Bear in mind, …

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For a snarky liberal like me, today’s Republican Party is a target-rich environment, to put it mildly.

And one of the more inviting targets is the so-called Janesville genius, Paul Ryan, mainly because of his pretensions to intellectualism and seriousness. Picking on the crazy likes of Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert is too easy. It’s far more fun to disparage a phony like Ryan.

Hence, I’m delighted to pass along THIS ANALYSIS from Howard Kurtz:

Last year, much of the mainstream media were willing to dismiss Paul Ryan’s flip-flop from  his previous position on Medicare cuts as mere campaign rhetoric calculated to make President Obama look bad among seniors.

But now Ryan has flipped back again on that issue, and the acrobatics seem to be hurting him, as Noam Scheiber EXPLAINS:

The problem with Ryan’s new budget—in which he reverts to his pre-campaign position on Medicare cuts — is that it more or less concedes the whole campaign, with its righteous defense of Medicare, was a charade. Among the Washington press corps, this is …

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For your emotional convenience, these have been arranged in ascending order of snarkiness.

The New York Times says THIS:

The budget, which will surely fly through the House, was quickly praised as “serious” and job-creating by the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, though it is neither. By cutting $4.6 trillion from spending over the next decade, it would reverse the country’s nascent economic growth, kill millions of real and potential jobs, and deprive those suffering the most of social assistance.

All the tired ideas from 2011 and 2012 are back: eliminating Medicare’s guarantee to retirees by turning it into …

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