<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, dropped by 30 Rock today to do a guest gig with the MSNBC Morning Zoo crew. (And, not for nothing, but do we have to entertain these layabouts at Fenway on Opening Day this Friday? Don&amp;#039;t the Sox have enough trouble right now without The Return Of Mike Barnicle, or &amp;quot;Willie&amp;quot; Geist getting cute all over the place? I have spared you the baseball chatter at the beginning of the clip above.) It is, of course, gospel among the chattering classes that the zombie-eyed granny-starver is a smart, likable fellow who can sell his zombie-eyed granny-starving to the country because he is so smart and likable, and not at all a Gingrichian bomb-thrower, and so the country will come around to his zombie-eyed granny-starving because he can package it like the zombie-eyed granny-starver next door. Of course, what usually goes unmentioned is that the zombie-eyed granny-starver is a thin-skinned political charlatan without the courage to say flatly what he intends to do with the country&amp;#039;s wealth, which is to shove even more of it upwards, thereby sending The Deficit \u2014 his only reason for living, if you listen to him \u2014 zooming up to somewhere deep in the heart of the Klingon Empire. And so Paul Ryan is very sad that the president has made all this something of a political issue: &amp;quot;We proposed to increase annual federal spending from $3.6 trillion a year to $4.9 trillion over a 10-year period instead of the president&amp;#039;s $5.5 trillion. Apparently the difference with this makes us social Darwinists,&amp;quot; Ryan said. The Budget Committee chairman went on to describe the president&amp;#039;s criticism as a &amp;quot;verbal tantrum&amp;quot; and say he believed Obama was employing &amp;quot;a rhetorical broadside to distract from the fact the president isn&amp;#039;t proposing solutions.&amp;quot; No, you condescending zombie-eyed granny-starver, what makes you a &amp;quot;social Darwinist&amp;quot; is your utter disregard for what your budget will do to people who are not the hedge-fund cowboys who foot your bar bill. What makes you a political coward is that you won&amp;#039;t honestly spell that out to the rest of the country.... But when Ryan was pressed on how he would specifically reform the tax code and set new cutoffs for entitlement programs, he remained elusive. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t even want to get into this cutoff... I&amp;#039;m not going to give you what I think is a rich person and what&amp;#039;s not a rich person, because these are job creators,&amp;quot; Ryan said. Has it escaped your notice, granny-starver, that the last sentence there doesn&amp;#039;t make a lick of sense? Ryan won&amp;#039;t say who&amp;#039;s rich and who&amp;#039;s poor because these are job creators? And what? If Paul Ryan says that someone as wealthy, say, Willard Romney is actually what he would call &amp;quot;rich,&amp;quot; the job creators will get all upset and stop creating jobs? No, he won&amp;#039;t say it because he knows that if he tells the truth on what he believes about income inequality, the country would fit him for a rubber nose and floppy shoes. A long time ago, David Stockman gave an interview to William Greider of The Atlantic in which Stockman gave away the game on the Reagan Administration&amp;#039;s economic plan, which Stockman called &amp;quot;a Trojan Horse to bring down the top rate.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s all Ryan&amp;#039;s alleged expertise on budgetary matters is, too. If he has ever proposed a concrete plan which would not as one of its primary purposes move the country&amp;#039;s wealth upwards, I&amp;#039;ve never read it. It becomes important because there is something of a boomlet now regarding the possibility that Romney will select the zombie-eyed granny-starver to be his vice-president. Now, I am of the opinion that, leaving aside 2008 as The Obvious Exception, vice-presidential nominees don&amp;#039;t really move the needle much one way or the other. And I have to wonder if the zombie-eyed granny-starver himself wouldn&amp;#039;t rather continue to be the Budget Wizard in the House \u2014 and, perhaps, preen himself for 2016 \u2014 rather than be the guy President Romney sends to funerals overseas. But chatterers need to chatter, and he&amp;#039;s the flavor of the month. The problem is that, by attaching itself too closely to the zombie-eyed granny-starving in question, the Republican party may well be positioning itself fatally behind the curve. It&amp;#039;s becoming quite clear that, by adopting a more populist theme since the president&amp;#039;s speech in Kansas last December, the president&amp;#039;s campaign has managed to shift the economic discussion in the country away from Wall Street and in the general direction of Zuccotti Park. (Shame those folks didn&amp;#039;t have a &amp;quot;coherent agenda&amp;quot; with which to move the dialogue.) That has resulted in a decidedly upward trend in the president&amp;#039;s polling numbers on economic issues, particularly those involving the continued economic survival of the middle class. He&amp;#039;s even leading Romney on &amp;quot;handling taxes,&amp;quot; an issue on which the president may be in the process of changing the argument from &amp;quot;lazy poor people are stealing your money&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;greedy rich people are stealing the country.&amp;quot; (I suspect he will phrase it rather differently this afternoon when he speaks on the Buffett Rule in Florida. Hard to believe Biden didn&amp;#039;t hire me for that speechwriting job back in &amp;#039;76.) When the zombie-eyed granny-starver meeps about the Buffett Rule as &amp;quot;pixie dust&amp;quot; \u2014 and this from a man who has based his &amp;quot;budget&amp;quot; on mathematics apparently designed by the Keebler elves \u2014 he is placing himself and his party in the path of what may be a powerful movement in the opposite direction. Ever since Wall Street trashed the world economy and stole what was left, the inchoate public rage always has had as its source a vaguely defined conviction that somebody, somewhere has cheated the rest of us out of our country. The political fight has been over who to blame for it. First, the Tea Party decided to blame Government, with a strong and familiar old counter-melody about lazy poor people. That&amp;#039;s a spent force right now. The zombie-eyed granny-starver is yammering so desperately about &amp;quot;class warfare.&amp;quot; The people who&amp;#039;ve paid for his political career are afraid that they just might lose one. So, go ahead, Willard. Pick him. Let him go out, day after day, and sell his bulked-up version of all the policies that threw the country into a ditch in the first place. Make him the economic face of your ticket. Let the country look into his zombie eyes and see all the grannies starving therein. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13607/paul-ryan-morning-joe-7986907/>