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" (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)      On Tuesday night, the zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan paid a visit to the Reagan Library, where the latest round of auditions are being held for the role of Not The Boring Guy in this year&amp;#039;s Republican production of a presidential campaign. He was preceded on what must indeed be a very sturdy stage by Governor Creosote of New Jersey, and by Florida senator Marco Rubio, also said to be contending for the role despite the fact that he is 11 years old. Both of them were said to have tapped into St. Ronnie&amp;#039;s sunnier side. None of that for Congressman Ryan. He decided to interpret the role of Not The Boring Guy through a purely Method performance of being a dick. He began by calling the incumbent a &amp;quot;failed president,&amp;quot; spicing things up with the inevitable oblique shot at Jimmy Carter, who, unlike the man for whom the library was named, left office without exploding the deficit or selling missiles to the Ayatollahs. We begin: I believe boldness and clarity of the kind that Ronald Reagan displayed in 1980 offer us the greatest opportunity to create a winning coalition in 2012. We will not only win the next election, we have a unique opportunity to sweep and remake the political landscape. He really is quite the charlatan, this guy. Note the line above about what Reagan &amp;quot;displayed in 1980&amp;quot; and keep it in mind while considering this next passage: A bold reform agenda is our moral obligation. If we make the case effectively and win this November, then we will have the moral authority to enact the kind of fundamental reforms America has not seen since Ronald Reagan&amp;#039;s first year. There is a &amp;quot;moral obligation&amp;quot; to shred Medicare and Medicaid, to make attending college immeasurably harder, and to throw children off their health care plans? To whom do we owe this moral obligation? But to concentrate on this is to fail to grasp the essence of the pure fakery that&amp;#039;s going on here. That&amp;#039;s embedded in Ryan&amp;#039;s invocation of &amp;quot;the kind of fundamental reforms America has not seen since Ronald Reagan&amp;#039;s first year.&amp;quot; See what he&amp;#039;s doing there? He just made the last seven years of the Reagan presidency disappear into his hat. He can&amp;#039;t invoke Reagan&amp;#039;s second or third years, or his seventh and eighth, because, during those years, among his other conservative apostasies, Ronald Reagan raised taxes 12 times. (He raised them four times between 1982 and 1984.) In 1983, he signed a Social Security bill that, among its provisions, made higher-income earners pay income tax on their benefits. Three years later, he signed a tax reform bill that shut down various shelters and gimmicks and thereby raised the rates on the country&amp;#039;s top earners. (Ryan, it should be noted, also talks about &amp;quot;tax reforms,&amp;quot; but declines to specify what precisely he means.) And Reagan did all this because he had to do it, because &amp;quot;the fundamental reforms&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;d enacted in his first year \u2014 the reforms that are very similar to those in Ryan&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;budget,&amp;quot; except that Ryan&amp;#039;s enthusiasm for zombie-eyed granny-starving makes Reagan look like Henry Wallace \u2014 exploded the deficit, threw the country into a deep recession in 1982, cost him 27 seats in the House, and dropped his approval ratings down into the low 40&amp;#039;s. At the library, then, Ryan was making a case that the country has a &amp;quot;moral obligation&amp;quot; to return to policies that not only nearly crashed the economy, but also brought down the Reagan presidency as well. Scoreboard! Ryan also leaned on an old historical trope of his that I&amp;#039;ve always found to be the last refuge of a true bunco artist: &amp;quot;We wonder if we will be the first generation in American history to leave our children with fewer opportunities and a less prosperous nation than the one we inherited.&amp;quot; Can this possibly be true? Didn&amp;#039;t parents in the depth of the Depression wonder the same thing? Didn&amp;#039;t the mothers and fathers who worked in the coal mines in the early years of the 20th century see pretty much the same future for their children and grandchildren? Didn&amp;#039;t the farmers ground up in the Panics of 1873 and 1837 \u2014 to name only two major events that occurred while the country pursued the policies that Ryan&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;budget&amp;quot; so deeply flattered \u2014 feel pretty damned hopeless of what would happen to their kids? Didn&amp;#039;t we ship kids west from the cities on orphan trains? Wasn&amp;#039;t this the normal state of affairs for generation after generation of African Americans? You know when people began to feel that they could leave their children with more opportunities than they had? When government got involved, that&amp;#039;s when, and when common people began to feel that the government was on their side, and not the wholly owned subsidiary of the wealthy and the privileged. The farmers started to feel it when the Morrill Act established land grant colleges. The miners began to feel it when unionization fought to make their jobs slightly less hellish and when government got behind that effort. The farmers began to feel it when the Progressives began to force change at the beginning of the last century. Everybody felt it with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the defeat of Hooverian economics, for which Paul Ryan seems overly nostalgic. And that feeling really took off in the 1950&amp;#039;s, when government passed the GI Bill and built the interstate highways, and made college affordable generally to the children and grandchildren of the people who won World War II like, say, me. And when we recognized that the death of a parent need not blight the hopes and dreams of his children, who would be allowed the opportunity of an education through the survivor benefits provided by Social Security, like, say, Paul Ryan was. The notion that we will leave a brighter day for our kids is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is one that was not possible without the intervention of the government, and it is one from which Paul Ryan profited so handsomely that he is now in a position to claim a &amp;quot;moral obligation&amp;quot; to deny it to everyone else. What a country. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14180/paul-ryan-reagan-library-speech-9091088/>