Paul Ryan: Second-hander, chickenhawk, and a GOP lapdog

For someone who has made a career out of being a government parasite, the honorable Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has the audacity to demonize the poor who are merely the victims of the wealth-destroying policies his party is guilty of engineering. Ryan has produced nothing, created nothing, and has spent all of his adult life sucking on the teat of government and enriching himself at the expense of the taxpayers he purportedly defends. At least the poor worked in the free market.

Joan Walsh, a normally rabid liberal partisan, puts it much more eloquently:

Paul Ryan represents the fakery at the heart of the Republican project today. It starts with the contradiction that Mr. Free Enterprise has spent his life in the bosom of government, enjoying the added protection of wingnut welfare benefactors like the Koch brothers. If Herman Cain is Charles and David Koch’s “brother from another mother,” as he famously joked, Ryan is the fourth Koch, swaddled in support from Americans for Prosperity and other Koch fronts. The man who wants to make the world safe for swashbuckling, risk-taking capitalists hasn’t spent a day at economic risk in his entire life.

I agree with Joan Walsh's analysis of the odious Ryan. He was George W. Bush's lapdog in the House and because of this partisan loyalty, he is awarded by the Republican Party establishment with a vice president slot. This is the man that voted to make permanent the Patriot Act, sided with Barack Obama in passing the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA, sided with corporatists in passing TARP, sided with corporatists in voting for the auto bailouts, voted for the massive expansion of the healthcare-industrial complex with Medicare D, and advocated for the liberty-infringing individual mandate. Does any of this sound libertarian? Yet the deceit that Ryan is libertarian is aggressively marketed by the Romney campaign and the establishment. Dave Gilson of the liberal magazine Mother Jones--not a real friend of libertarians--asked the question, just how libertarian is Ryan? And their answer: not at all.

Ryan's parody of a "budget plan"--hardly a plan and hardly a sensible budget-- eviscerates his claim to be a "deficit hawk." His plan does not cut spending for decades and any spending it does cut disproportionately affects the poor and underprivileged. Furthermore, it does not touch a single cent in defense spending and in fact increases it.

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com writes:

Ryan claims “years of ignoring the real drivers of our debt have left us with a profound structural problem,” and to him this means throwing grandmothers out in the street rather than cut one dime from billions going to Lockheed. The “Ryan budget,” endorsed by House Republicans, would cancel planned cuts in the growth rate of military appropriations, and increase the Pentagon’s budget by $20 billion. He’s right that the trajectory of our debt-to-income ratio is “catastrophic,” yet is patently dishonest in describing what or who is driving us over a fiscal cliff.

Ryan's chickenhawk bloodlust for more imperialist carnage against brown-skinned foreigners with "funny names" is completely at odds with the foreign policy of peace and prosperity that unites grassroots libertarians. Jesse Walker is more explicit, saying that libertarians should find it easy to reject Ryan, echoing the same points that Adam Kokesh raised (as depicted in this article's image) and the foreign policy issues Raimondo addressed. Jack Hunter laments, "If Paul Ryan wants to go down the old neocon route, Americans can expect Bush-Obama Part 2--the same foreign policy with the same tragic cost, debt, despair and hopelessness."

If I was not clear, I will say it much more explicitly: Ryan is a neoconservative with a very tenuous claim to libertarianism or the Tea Party movement. Ryan is as much of a "Tea Party libertarian" as Obama is a "bleeding-heart progressive." Libertarians should be wary.

Comments

[Eric Dondero]

Non-interventionism, or what we pro-defense libertarians like to call surrender-tarianism, is a viewpoint of the LEFTWING of the libertarian movement. Only LEFT-LIBERTARIANS are anxious to surrender to Islamo-Fascism. We Right-Libertarians want to fight back.

We don't want our wives/girlfriends forced to wear ugly black burkas from head to toe, bikinis outlaws, alcohol and gambling banned, our gay friends hung from lampposts, and our marijuana smoking buddies jailed for life under Sharia Law.

Paul Ryan holds vies consistent with Right-libertarians. A Left-libertarian (America-hater) he is not. Thankfully!

Eric Dondero, Publisher
LibertarianRepublican.net

[republicanmother]

You are eight times more likely to be killed by the police than a muslim terrorist.
How do you explain that our goverment is cheering on Al Qaeda and the CFR says Al Qaeda is great?

I'm not a "surrender-tarian", I'm just educated. How the crap does votingfor bailouts make Ryan libertarian in any universe?
I take offence to being called an American-hater, it's ignorance that's killing it.

[Eric Parks]

Could it be that the neoconservatives are desperate for libertarian votes? Could they be stretching the meaning of libertarianism (the belief in the non-initiation of force) to sound like a watered-down version of their own socialist ideals to get those votes?

Great post, Jayel.