NP - Romney/Ryan

[David Morris]

Charles Pierce:

*Leave it to Willard Romney,* international man of principle, to get
himself bullied into being bold and independent.


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.

In addition, Romney now has forced the administration itself to confront
its own silly attempts to woo Ryan as a serious man of policy back in the
day. Granted, they split rather permanently last April, when the president,
correctly, referred to Ryan's
"budget"<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/03/obama-paul-ryan-budget-social-darwinism_n_1399080.html>
as
"thinly veiled social Darwinism." (Ryan got all sad about how things had
deteriorated.) But, prior to that, the president had treated Ryan as though
the president were, oh, I don't know, a CNN anchor or something,
specifically wooing him prior to the big health-care summit back in 2010,
when everybody was oh-so-reasonable while the howler monkeys were out
across the dim horizon, photoshopping bones through the president's nose.
Nonetheless, it can be argued — and I'm fairly sure it will be — that Ryan
is the logical end of any Grand Bargain the White House strikes on the
economy and on debt reduction. And, if you have committed yourselves to
that latter purpose over most others, then it's harder for you to argue
against a guy who's more committed than you are to your own ultimate goal.


I have none of those problems.


Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform
entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them
because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He
is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in
which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what
kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we
will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most
primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three
words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech
he's ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as
something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius
of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through
which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.

Read more:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/paul-ryan-romney-vp-pick-11562917#ixzz23FvKJ3YX
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