Paul Ryan really got what he deserved for suggesting that anyone whose kids get nutritional assistance at school doesn’t care about their kids. Turns out, his story about a kid who wanted his lunch in a brown paper bag because it would prove that someone cared about him was lifted from a book written by an advocate of nutritional assistance. The story is actually true, but no one will care because Paul Ryan attributed the story to Eloise Anderson, who serves as the Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. Sec. Anderson has testified falsely before Ryan’s committee that she had been the one to meet this child. In fact, the real event happened a quarter century ago, and the child is now in his late 30’s.
The whole point of the book is that children shouldn’t go hungry. And it wound up being twisted into an argument for letting kids starve.
Nice work, Ryan. You’re not just about starving granny anymore.
As if we should care about what Paul Ryan says anymore.
He’s still a loser.
A loser, yes, but Chairman of the House Budget Committee.
Oh dear, I’m trying not to think of such things.
Seems like everybody got in on the act vis a vis Paul Ryan idiocy.
There was even a twitter hastag created!
Thanks! #ryanecdotes are hilarious in a scary way, two more:
Angry Dan @danecdotal · 12h
Paul Ryan once threw a silver dollar across the Potomac river… After a homeless man had asked him if he could spare a dollar. #Ryanecdotes
John W. Ennis @johnennis · 9h
Two mothers were fighting over a baby, so he cut the baby in half and the moms thanked him. #ryanecdotes
Bartcop has died. Blogosphere flags shall fly at half-mast.
Damn! I loved that guy. Stop by, pay your respects and drop some coin on Terry’s widow if you can.
Paul Ryan learned about this kid while running a sub-3 hour marathon straight up his 50th ascent of a 14,000 ft peak in the Rocky Mountains.
Completely believable.
As documented in the new album by his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.
…which broke up a decade ago.
Rand Paul Ryan 2016
Campaign slogan: “I Want To Believe.”
Campaign slogan: “F___ Granny and her grandkids too.”
Campaign slogan…Forced Hunger is a Virtue.
I went to Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) in the early 1970’s (1973-graduate). I know these theocrats very well. They haven’t changed their spots since then & they’re not likely to change them in the future. The GOP needs to be contained like the Ebola virus (or Andromeda Strain) and the Dems must start getting more robust in their political approach – “bare-knuckels”.
Ryan’s the perfect poster child for what’s become of the GOP. The man has no soul and no shame.
Which means the only way to beat an asshole like that is to, figuratively of course, beat the snot out of him. Over and over.
How do you tell when a politician is lying?
I know… democrats don’t generally lie, although our president is drifting perilously close to something far worse with his creeping the police state.
The story is designed to undermine the notion that government can and should help. The GOP does this every day in all sorts of ways.
The fact is, punishing people (even supposedly innocent kids) for their immoral behavior is the primary goal of the radical GOP and about half this country is in favor of doing just that. And most of them are old. Maybe starving granny isn’t such a bad idea.
I remember saying never trust anyone under 30 until I reached 31.
Given the extended adolescence common in America today, I think the new cut off is about 40. And never trust anyone from a red state, rural areas, religious people, etc. etc.
Nitpick: “deserts”, not “desserts”. 🙂
huh?
“Just deserts”:
I know some of the humor can be dry but not that much.
Ryan’s response will be that it doesn’t matter that it’s not a true story because it’s what he believes.
I keep getting emails from Rob Zerban, Ryan’s Dem opponent in 2012. Does anyone know if it might be possible to take this heartless zombie out? Any polls?
Starvation builds character. Or something.
If the Democratic Party was even mildly competent they would run an advertising campaign based solely on video quotes of Republicans with a tag line pointing out that this is what the GOP stands for. Probably would be enough to win the House back.
Seriously, the reason the GOP has any power at all except in the reddest of red states is that too many people believe the propaganda – that the GOP is about “small government, freedom, strong defense” and the Democrats are for the opposite. If the Democrats could make the GOP run on what they actually believe we’d have landslide elections.
I would hope you are right, but I’m not so sure those ads wouldn’t end in a GOP landslide. You have much more faith in the goodness of the people here than I. I take the radical GOP at its word and, I suspect, most of their supporters do too. Let’s not let the voters off the hook.
If you think half the country is misinformed, then I suppose that leads us to one set of policy choices. If you believe, as I do, that half the country really does embrace the radical GOP agenda, then we must pursue different policies. It is dangerous to mistake their hatred for simple ignorance.
So I live amongst a heavily wingnut populace here in El Paso County, Colorado (home to Focus on the Family and at least 130 other far right Xtian fundamentalist non-profits; home to 3 military bases, the Air Force Academy and NORAD; and not home to a lot of high tech which we used to have but the fundies drove off so many high tech employees that most of those companies have moved out).
Wingnuts are wingnuts. Nothing with change their mind. Forget trying. This is what drive me bats about Democrats bending over backwards to try to appease wingnuts on issues like gun proliferation and abortion – all the Democrats will accomplish is to drive the wingnuts even further to the right.
But there is a great middle ground of moderate-to-low information voters who internalize varying degrees of wingnut propaganda. They “know” things which are easily proven untrue because wingnut propaganda has successfully asserted it. You know: Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet; California’s problems were due to far left government (between Jerry Brown’s terms as governor the GOP held the office 23 of 28 years); Obama raised taxes; Obama drastically increased government spending; most taxes go to things like food stamps; etc.
Unfortunately, Democrats are horribly pathetic at countering this stuff. Most of us here know, for example, that Holland and Sweden have the lowest abortion rates (illegal + legal) in the world, despite abortion being legal there – but few mainstream voters do. Democrats tend to get all weak-kneed and try to change the topic. What has resulted is a massive information vacuum that the right-center Washington-based news media has filled with mostly right-wing tropes.
While all this was happening in the media (an evolution dating to the killing of the Fairness Doctrine and the reduction of limitations of concentration in media ownership in 1986 – made worse by the 1996 bill that Bill Clinton, of course, signed) something else was happening. The GOP became what Nixon unintentionally envisoned when he proposed the “Southern Strategy”. By putting all racist, redneck, anti-intellectual, and downright stupid morons all in one party instead of spreading them out between two parties they slowly pushed out the former moderate Republicans.
So, for quite a long time we’ve had a situation where Republicans poll better than their policies. I mean, this isn’t new – it was observed first late in the first year of Reagan’s first term. But right now the situation has never been so extreme.
One party actually has voted for – literally dozens of times – a budget that ends the guarantee of medical coverage for seniors who have paid into Medicare all their lives. Yes, it does so only for people of a certain age (55 or younger at the time of the vote, usually) – but the premise that you can get medical care in a free market as a senior is crazy and something even most wingnuts wouldn’t support. And so on.
To me the problem is that the GOP isn’t paying the price for the policies they advocate because they really run on slogans. This has gone on so long that today they often are honest about their policies. We have tons of video showing that, including the Paul Ryan speech at the CPC.
Middle-of-the-road voters would frankly be horrified if they knew that was what the GOP wanted to implement. Of course, initially they’ll disbelieve it. That’s why a long campaign of video clips of statements by GOP elected officials is necessary.
Agreed.
Some people are born and raised wingnuts, and there is no hope of changing their minds.
There are others, though, who are generally not involved with politics who believe a little bit of the wingnut bullshittery, but don’t vote.
Those are the wingnuts that are worth talking to. I’ve personally changed the mind of one non-voting “conservative” because they just never came across real, objective reality before. Think the South/Slave States.
Someone could easily edit together clips of these disgusting fucks talking about hating the poor, talking about cutting programs that real people depend on, and change the minds of the people who usually don’t get involved and are nominally conservative.
There no real reason not to do this, and I’d argue that the best way to go about doing something like this is through a PAC that can push these ads everywhere, all the time, without naming a particular Democrat that you should vote for, hence at least limiting any wingnut backlash.
I doubt a lot of non-voting conservatives are going to go out and register to vote because they see Republicans talking about hurting people like them. And we already know that Republicans own the midterms because of Democratic voter apathy/ignorance.
So why the fuck not do something like this?
A dKos diary by “otto” worth reading: Paul Ryan’s Stolen Point.
Some excellent comments as well.
Feed the children and stop the institutional shaming of poor children who already have too much to deal with in their young lives.
Ryan knows his base.
Really, what’s the point of being a Republican or going to the church of Calvin/money if you can’t look down on the weak and useless?Isn’t that the whole point?
5 year moochers on the dole, never made a job in their entire life.
Why give them food or treat them like human beings, when we all know they will just grow up to be minimum wage slaves who will want abortions, do drugs, and likely not hate gay people because Calvin knows they aren’t going to heaven the way us money worshipping christianists will be.