Apparently, Rep. Paul Ryan missed the outcome of last November’s presidential election. Oh, wait – wasn’t he on the ballot in that election as Mitt Romney’s running mate?
Well, yes, but less than five months later, Ryan seems to have forgotten that he and the Mittster were soundly rejected. Maybe the trauma of losing – including losing his own hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin – has his memory slippage. Whatever the cause, it’s embarrassing to see him now trotting out the very same Republican budget proposal that he wrote last year and put at the center of the Romney-Ryan national campaign – the same nauseating budget extremism that induced the great majority of Americans to upchuck.
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Ryan recently headlined a Washington media event for the re-release of this bucket of right-wing hash. It includes turning Medicare into a “WeDon’tCare” privatized voucher scheme that would deliver seniors into the tender clutches of giant insurance corporations, forcing the elderly to pay more for less. Also, in order to save the superrich from even the slightest tax increase, Ryan again serves up a mess of cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, and other vital programs for the poor, while simultaneously jacking-up the tax burden on both the poor and the middle class.
Then, to make his package even more odious to the general public, he cluelessly re-issues the far right’s cry to repeal Obamacare. Hello, Paul – reality calling: Obama thoroughly thumped you and Mitt on this issue last year. Remember? And since the election, Obamacare has grown in popularity, with several Republican governors now seeing the political light and embracing Obama’s signature health care reform.
It’s time for family and friends to circle around Paul for a sanity intervention, gently trying to pull him out of the rabbit hole he’s stuck in.
“GOP budget takes aim again at Obamacare, Medicaid,” www.yahoo.com, March 12, 2013.
“What the American People Didn’t Choose,” www.thinkprogress.com, March 11, 2013.
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