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marmar

(76,976 posts)
Wed Aug 8, 2012, 04:36 AM Aug 2012

Fussbudget: How Paul Ryan captured the G.O.P.


from the New Yorker:


Fussbudget
How Paul Ryan captured the G.O.P.

by Ryan Lizza August 6, 2012


One day in March, 2009, two months after the Inauguration of President Obama, Representative Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, sat behind a small table in a cramped meeting space in his Capitol Hill office. Hunched forward in his chair, he rattled off well-rehearsed critiques of the new President’s policies and America’s lurch toward a “European” style of government. Ryan’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all died before their sixtieth birthdays, so Ryan, who is now forty-two, could be forgiven if he seemed like a man in a hurry. Tall and wiry, with a puff of wavy dark hair, he is nearly as well known in Washington for his punishing early-morning workouts as he is for his mastery of the federal budget. Asked to explain his opposition to Obama’s newly released budget, he replied, “I don’t have that much time.”

Ryan won his seat in 1998, at the age of twenty-eight. Like many young conservatives, he is embarrassed by the Bush years. At the time, as a junior member with little clout, Ryan was a reliable Republican vote for policies that were key in causing enormous federal budget deficits: sweeping tax cuts, a costly prescription-drug entitlement for Medicare, two wars, the multibillion-dollar bank-bailout legislation known as TARP. In all, five trillion dollars was added to the national debt. In 2006 and 2008, many of Ryan’s older Republican colleagues were thrown out of office as a result of lobbying scandals and overspending. Ryan told me recently that, as a fiscal conservative, he was “miserable during the last majority” and is determined “to do everything I can to make sure I don’t feel that misery again.”

In 2009, Ryan was striving to reintroduce himself as someone true to his ideological roots and capable of reversing his party’s reputation for fiscal profligacy. A generation of Republican leaders was gone. Ryan had already jumped ahead of more senior colleagues to become the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, and it was his job to pick apart Obama’s tax and spending plans. At the table in his office, Ryan pointed out the gimmicks that Presidents use to hide costs and conceal policy details. He deconstructed Obama’s early health-care proposal and attacked his climate-change plan. Obama’s budget “makes our tax code much less competitive,” he said, as if reading from a script. “It makes it harder for businesses to survive in the global economy, for people to save for their own retirement, and it grows our debt tremendously.” He added, “It just takes the poor trajectory our country’s fiscal state is on and exacerbates it.”

As much as he relished the battle against Obama—“European,” he repeated, with some gusto—his real fight was for the ideological identity of the Republican Party, and with colleagues who were content to simply criticize the White House. “If you’re going to criticize, then you should propose,” he told me. A fault line divided the older and more cautious Republican leaders from the younger, more ideological members. Ryan was, and remains, the leader of the attack-and-propose faction. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza#ixzz22wSG7JyZ




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Fussbudget: How Paul Ryan captured the G.O.P. (Original Post) marmar Aug 2012 OP
That man is scary. Nt xchrom Aug 2012 #1
Yup. An ideologue with a bug up his ass is always scary... JHB Aug 2012 #2
Oh, for fucks sake, seriously Cosmocat Aug 2012 #3

JHB

(37,128 posts)
2. Yup. An ideologue with a bug up his ass is always scary...
Wed Aug 8, 2012, 06:49 AM
Aug 2012

...and history has given us good reason to be scared of his type.


Also, “If you’re going to criticize, you should propose” requires actually proposing, not leaving the essentials to handwaves. There;s a word (or several) for people who don't do what they claim to do.


Cosmocat

(14,543 posts)
3. Oh, for fucks sake, seriously
Wed Aug 8, 2012, 07:19 AM
Aug 2012

He was an automatic and uncritical vote of all the disasters during the Bush years that constitute 85% of the current debt problem, but somehow is now championed as the voice of reason for party that fundamentally only has one singular goal - destroying the current president of the united states.

He is a fraud, complete and total.

Like Romney, a guy who simply just looks the part.

That is it. He is simple minded and just a tool to advance the same horrific republican scam they keep relentlessly advancing, year, after year, after year.

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