Saturday, August 11, 2012

Mitt picks Paul Ryan; Democrats heard celebrating wildly.

Wow...Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan to be his VP.  Hail Mary just before the start of the football season, two straight presidential elections in a row.

Talk about the Democratic Party's biggest dreams come true.

As Ezra Klein notes, "It wasn’t a Republican strategy to put him forward. As Ryan Lizza recounts in his New Yorker profile of Ryan, it was a Democratic strategy to put Ryan forward."

And two days ago, Chris Cillizza wrote that, "Democrats are salivating — not literally but damn close — over the prospect of Romney putting Ryan on the ticket."

Here's what the five basic tenets of the attack on Mitt/Ryan will be:
  • Paul Ryan wants to privatize social security and gut Medicare by capping its growth, such that senior citizens will have to spend more out of pocket each subsequent year they're alive.  And that's just a decade after he voted to expand Medicare!  Paul Ryan flip-flops nearly as often as Mitt Romney does.
  • Paul Ryan's been using fuzzy math from the Heritage Foundation to suggest that he could get unemployment lower than it has ever been in the history of the US, if only he gets to gut federal spending -- defense spending, of course, notwithstanding.
  • That same fuzzy math enables Paul Ryan to pretend that he'll be able to cut spending by cutting taxes for the rich (aka Republican job creators), followed by a trickle down of money from the rich to the middle-class and poor, who already send a larger percentage of their income to the IRS than the rich.
  • By virtue of promising to repeal Obamacare, Mitt wants to bring back the lifetime benefits cap that Obamacare banned, and wants to give health insurers the right to not insure those middle class folks who have preexisting conditions.  Remember, Mitt's got ZERO alternatives on paper, to bring those items back!
  • Paul and Mitt want to create Medicaid block grants so that states and the poor will be stuck with the bill for Medicaid, and as a result, we will see the lifespan of Americans shorten.
My jaw just dropped.  Mitt found a way to divert attention away from his taxes......... to the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security cuts that Paul and Mitt have proposed.


Update: Watching the whole show going on with the introduction of Paul Ryan, I've noticed three things:
  • Paul Ryan, in criticizing both parties for failure to keep debt and deficits down, obviously excluded himself and his votes for two unfunded wars, two unfunded Bush tax cuts, and a vote for the largest expansion of Medicare in its history.
  • Surprisingly, Republicans continue to try to push the message of being strong on defense, by placing the whole event right in front of the USS Wisconsin, at home in Virginia.  Apparently the fiasco of Bush's show on the USS Abraham Lincoln has long been forgotten.
  • And the news media has picked up the message: moderate Republicans aren't exactly thrilled, but conservative Republicans and Democrats of all stripes, are very excited.

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