Randian Pout
by digby
David Brooks:
"It is sad, although not strange, that in today’s Washington they have never had a serious private conversation. The president has never invited Ryan over even for lunch."
Uhm, someone needs to tell Ryan that whining to the press about the president not being your bff hasn't worked out so well in the past:
The truth is that the Democrats have energetically helped to promote the fiction that Ryan is some sort of political savant when the truth is that he's an intellectually adolescent, Beck loving Randian wingnut. The president himself fell all over Ryan's earlier blueprint as a "serious" plan and appointed him to his Catfood Commission which helped set the stage for the Village swoon that happened last week.
Ryan would be nowhere without the Democrats pumping up his reputation. But that doesn't stop him from being petulant and pouty the minute he gets some criticism.
You just attended the President's speech on reducing the debt. Was it what you expected?
No, quite honestly, Charlie, it was pretty much the opposite of what I expected. I had thought that with his invitation [to attend the speech] … he was going to extend an olive branch so he could get on the path to bipartisan solutions. And we got anything but that. We got dramatic distortions of our budget proposal. In the beginning of the week when he sent his campaign manager out to mention he was going to do this speech rather than his Budget Director or his Treasury Secretary, a little red flag went up in my mind. But then when I got to the speech, and we heard this, it was extremely political, very partisan.
President Obama called your plan "a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can't afford to fix them … but we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy." How do you respond?
I don't even know what to say about that. First of all, we're not even talking about cutting taxes. We're talking about keeping tax revenues where they are [by making the Bush tax cuts permanent] and cleaning up all the junk in the tax code for a flatter, fair, simpler tax system. So we're not talking about cutting taxes. We want to keep the tax revenues where they are and fix the tax code. And with respect to all the spending—you know, that partisan-spending rhetoric—if you don't fix entitlements, Charlie, if you don't get spending under control, there's not going to be any money left for those other things, for roads, for bridges, for education, for the environment. So I'm amazed that he would use that kind of hyperbolic, hyperventilating rhetoric to describe our plan.
Bring me mah smellin' salts Miss Mellie, I like to faint away!
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