“He’s saying: ‘Eat your broccoli. And then maybe you don’t get to eat at all for a few days. You don’t get steak — ever.’ ”
Official Washington likes the idea of the “small people” starving and that, more than Ryan’s baby blues and hard-working staff, is what makes him a Village heart-throb. But I don’t see this playing in Peoria.
asiangrrlMN
Holy shit. I thought you were cracking wise and paraphrasing the J. Bush comment, but no. You were not. Really? You don’t get to eat for a few days? Nice. And, WTF? Ryan is every bit an ideologue–and an idiot to boot. And as someone else pointed out below-thread, this quote:
is pure bullshit. OK, I said the last part, but it is. Let’s leave it aside? Uh, no. Let’s not. Because if you have to actually answer this question, the rest of the article is pretty much useless.
ETA: Let’s pretend that the Republicans are actually interested in compromising and that their positions aren’t full of bullshit and stupidity. This is essentially what the writer is saying. Gah. Need to poke out my own eyes with a rusty pitchfork.
suzanne
Christ on a cracker. Every time I think they can’t get crazier… they do. My imagination is apparently limited by my ethics, but obviously the Rethuglicans don’t have that problem.
Jamie
Beware of millionaire trust fund babies asking for sacrifice.
Urza
And what happens to the people who are allergic to broccoli? Or hey, what ever happened to the Atkins ideology of all steak all the time? Guess thats only for republican elites.
Jamie
well to be fair wasn’t his mother going on about how lucky the Katrina victims were.
d.s.
In the last year Republicans defined socialism as “making cuts to Medicare.”
I’m not sure what the hell would happen if they tried to enforce their austerity plan. The vast majority of federal social spending is on seniors.
asiangrrlMN
@asiangrrlMN: It was matt who pointed out the part I blockquoted. Wanted to give him proper attribution.
You know, the more I think about Jeb’s quote, the angrier I get. Why? Because I would bet serious coinage that he was trying to give an example that was very extreme. “You don’t eat for a few days.” I bet he doesn’t even know or care that there are people who don’t eat every day. Fucker.
Belvoir
Holy mackerel! (At least on can eat a mackerel. A nice horseradish sauce goes well.)
““He’s saying: ‘Eat your broccoli. And then maybe you don’t get to eat at all for a few days. You don’t get steak — ever.’ ”
A Bush (!) telling people to their faces – 1. You will eat this thing that we Bushes famously find unpleasant, 2. we will starve you, 3. don’t ever dream of eating the steak I eat every night, or the steak my dog eats every night.
Boggling, how naked and upfront they are about how they plan to utterly fuck people. “Maybe you don’t get to eat for a few days”. And they still get votes. Sick stuff.
Nick
Pretty sure this country is in the middle of a civil war and we don’t even know it yet.
And our mainstream media is proudly promoting the words of a man who is saying “we’re going to make those in need suffer even more”
Because, you see, that’s the American way.
JGabriel
Matt Bai, From The Same Article:
How does anyone get away with writing such stupid shit? How can someone with enough grammatical skill to compose those sentences not read them and think, “No, wait, a failed bill isn’t a good example of bipartisanship; it’s a good example of a failed bill and bipartisan FAILURE”?
This guy’s an Ivy League graduate?
Even if I’m being too hard on Bai (hey, we all have brain fart moments, right?), where the hell were his editors?
(Is every sentence in this comment a question? How’d that happen? Why’d I do that? Have I momentarily lost the ability to make declarative statements?)
.
Joseph Nobles
I can’t ever hear anything Paul Ryan says, and my reason why is so petty. It’s that freaking hairline of his.
Is it real? It just doesn’t match his face. His face has lived a few years longer than that hairline. It’s got to be plugs. But then again, it makes him look like he should be in short pants. If it’s fake, then he did that to himself consciously to get votes. I say to myself, no one intelligent does that to themselves conciously for any reason whatsoever. If they do wake up from the procedure and look at such a god-awful clash with the rest of their face, anyone intelligent says, “Put me back under, that’s just ridiculous.” Hairplugs that offputting are reasons to smile sadly at a person and ignore everything else the person says.
So then I’m forced to conclude, being the gracious person I am, that the hairline must be real. But if it’s real, it’s too perfect and all I can ever then concentrate on is watching to see the inevitable recession back into his scalp, back where the rest of his earnest, earnest face says his hairline belongs. Petty, petty, petty.
By this point in the thought process, the camera has usually moved on to someone else. So I never hear anything Paul Ryan says.
JGabriel
@Belvoir:
Even more boggling: Jeb honestly means it as praise of Ryan, not condemnation.
.
KG
See, I took this as Jeb saying that Ryan’s plan is utterly untenable from the beginning. Same with the line about putting aside Ryan’s plan as it’s written. This isn’t so much about the finished product as it is about a starting point. I could be wrong about this (and I’m sure I’ll be told by everyone else here how wrong I am), but if you really want serious opposition, then taking Obama’s approach of considering this a serious proposal and appreciating Ryan’s position that there is room for compromise.
Kryptik
I’m confused here. Is Jeb saying this as a criticism or as praise? Because Christ all, the way the article frames it seems to characterize it as a laud.
Nick
@JGabriel:
He has a job to do. His job is make sure the election is close and do what he can to make the Republicans win so the Times pages can be filled with scandal and political drama, people can be more turned off, and they sell more papers.
Also, please the wealthy advertisers, who hate having the Democrats in power threatening them with taxes.
asiangrrlMN
@JGabriel: By the way, I agree with your assessment of Bai, but I am actually commenting because you made me laugh like hell with your last parenthetical.
@Joseph Nobles: You, too, made me laugh.
Thanks to both of you for the chuckle. I have a hunch I’m going to need all the laughs I can get in the upcoming election season.
MattR
@asiangrrlMN: Even worse is that the paragraph before the one you blockquoted mentions that Krugman called Ryan a “flimflam man”. But let’s not examine whether or not Ryan is full of shit. This guy should go work for Bernie Madoff. “Let’s ignore whether or not it was a Ponzi scheme and focus on what an innovative guy Bernie was”
Nick
@Kryptik: he’s praising him. He’s saying Ryan can’t say this on the campaign trail, but that’s how we’re going to govern.
the needy starve, and they just have to suck it up…times are hard…we had to sell our Tuscan villa and all we have is our Hamptons mansion, so the poor need to shutup about not eating for a few days.
JGabriel
Joseph Nobles:
It is not plugs; it is Devo!
.
Kryptik
@Nick:
Well, excuse me then, I’m going to kill a bottle of Grey Goose right now, because fuck all if I find myself depressed at the sheer depths our discourse as sunk to, where this kind of rhetoric is not only accepted, but encouraged and lauded with no pushback.
EDIT: Yo, JGabriel, might wanna fix your link tag there. Everything beneath you’s gone bold.
Mark S.
Well, it wouldn’t be all broccoli:
I’ve got four wetsuits and two dildos for Mr. Bush and Mr. Ryan. Call now, and asiangrrlmn will throw in two rusty pitchforks at no extra charge!
asiangrrlMN
@KG: OK. I can see how you get where you’re going with this, at least the Jeb part. However, the sentence before says that the GOP admire his boldness while saying it’s too bleak. There is no explanation of the quote, so the reader is forced to make conjectures as to what J. Wub actually meant by it.
I can even see what you’re saying with the second part of your comment, but I can’t get past the part I quoted. Ryan’s plan is not remotely reasonable or practical or implementable. And, frankly, he is not an intellectual, no matter how many times people repeat that he is. So, any discussion of compromise is kinda pointless because there is no compromise between reasonable and batshitcrazy.
So, in conclusion, even if I read the article with your interpretation in mind, it’s still horribly written and full of false assumptions and nonsense. In short, it need not be written.
@MattR: Well, you know, up to the reader, blah blah blah. I’m just a stenographer. I just report the news (or make it up). It’s up for the reader to decide.
monkeyboy
One of GHW Bush’s famous quips was that now that he was President he was powerful enough to refuse to eat broccoli.
So I guess the lesson is people need to sacrifice unless they are rich and powerful, or maybe people need to sacrifice the rich and powerful.
jwb
@Belvoir: Well, at least you can say that Jeb is being honest. I have to say that I’m finding myself increasingly unsympathetic to those who vote for Republicans and then are shocked, shocked, shocked when they get fucked over in exactly the way the goopers announced they were going to fuck them over.
On the other hand I think it’s terribly curious that the Very Serious People(R) are all for doing whatever they can to increase the suffering of the poor (because that shows they can make the tough choices or something) but won’t stand for even the slightest sacrifice of their own when it comes to things like global warming or paying fir the wars they so enthusiastically cheered.
DPS
That’s actually great. I’d have thought if you were a scion of a dynasty Marie Antoinette would have been off-limits, but what do I know?
Nick
@Kryptik:
We’re debating whether or not to repeal a right in the Constitution and if Muslims have the right to freedom of religion because they happen to belong to the same faith as a group of douches who flew planes into building.
How are you surprised?
Citizen Alan
Isn’t all this moaning about Paul Ryan a bit disingenuous given that he is running virtually unopposed in a Blue district that went heavily for Obama in 2008? The DCCC has made no meaningful efforts to defeat him, and his only opposition in 2010 is John Heckenlively, an unknown, unemployed morbidly obese guy who looks like Michael Moore’s loser brother with no funding who just barely got the 1000 signatures needed to get on the ballot. Obama has been eager to work with Ryan on the deficit commission, and I’m sure Obama will be eager to work with Ryan when he becomes Chairman of the Budget Committee and will embrace his damn fool ideas in the interests of bipartisanship.
Oh shoot. There I go again with the circular firing squad and all that. You know, forget I said anything. I’ll just be over in the corner, clapping as hard as I can.
JGabriel
Earlier today I argued:
Lest anyone think I was exaggerating – Krugman, via Mark S.:
.
Nick
@Citizen Alan:
It went narrowly Obama, the first time that happened since 1996, and Ryan’s never won less than 57% of the vote.
If we were going to beat him, that time has passed.
Nick
@jwb:
I’ve defriended most of my Republican friends, I just can’t see them as human beings anymore.
KG
@asiangrrlMN: I’ll definitely agree with your conclusion about the column/article. It was terribly written and was somewhat rambling to boot. I guess I’m still holding out hope that the GOP will become a serious, viable opposition party; so any opportunity to move in that direction, even if it’s baby steps at first, seems like a good idea.
MattR
@Nick:
Now that is a psychitzophrenic district. Prescient enough to vote for Obama in 1996, but stupid enough to keep voting for Ryan.
matt
Call me an élitist (thanks New Yorker for the tip on how to spell elitist), but I have a hard time believing someone with Ryan’s educational background could be all that intellectual.
freelancer (itouch)
The modern GOP: too wingnutty and tone-deaf for. The. Bush. Family.
The universe astounds.
Nick
@MattR:
Obviously I meant Clinton in 1996…but interestingly enough as Obama became the first Democrat to ever actually win the district with a majority (51%) since God knows when, Ryan got 64%. Look how many people voted for conflicting things.
jl
asiangrrlMN said everything I was going to say.
She is wise. Thank you, fake internet wife.
Except I do agree with KG that Jeb Bush may have meant that the plan was too drastic to be politically viable. Or maybe even that they plan wouldn’t work because it was too hard on the non rich 99 percent, assuming Bush actually understood the Ryan plan.
In any case, the article is so poorly written that it is impossible to know what Bush meant.
Since Krugman laid out, almost line by line, why the Ryan plan is a simple fraud, a naive person might think it odd that the writer could not be bothered to spend a paragraph on the plan’s merits, or lack of them.
So, if I am a high hat sophisticated NY Times reporter, would I feel that something might be wrong when a short ambiguous quote by Jeb Bush is the most substantive piece of real analysis in the article? Or not?
The reporter might say that since the piece appeared under ‘politics’ it was OK that is was all sloppy superficial BS.
Edit: as an example of sloppy superficial BS, if Ryan’s plan is a fraud, how can it be the basis of any kind of pragmatic compromise that would work in reality?
asiangrrlMN
@Nick: Same here. We vote Dem for pres reliably (only state Dukakis carried), but are wildly divergent locally (third party voting).
@jl: That’s why ya fake-married me. And, I really like your last paragraph. Very funny in a dry way.
Nick
@asiangrrlMN: Personally, I think we need a parliamentary system…people need to go to the polls and vote for an agenda, not a person.
My neighbors are all voting for Anthony Weiner’s Republican opponent this year, despite the fact they’re all ridiculously liberal and Weiner’s opponent praises Paul Ryan’s plan…but they’re doing it because his daughter in law grew up on the block.
tomvox1
The fact that this dumb fuck–Matt Bai by name–does not know that Social Security is actually goddamn solvent and therefore Ryan is undoubtedly and utterly FULL OF SHIT in nearly everything he proposes makes me want to weep blood. We are all Megan McArdle now…
Nick
@tomvox1:
Solvent=rationed and pillaged so the rich can get bigger tax cuts.
Woodrow L. Goode, IV
Doug, it’s nice of you to bring the article to people’s attention. But, in your rush to do some horserace journalism– what you think Ryan’s chances to be elected President are– you completely missed the real significance of the piece.
The small thing is this quote: “Let’s leave aside for now the debate over the viability of [Ryan’s economic plan], which, as a practical matter, doesn’t stand a chance of being enacted as is, anyway… The more pertinent question is whether Mr. Ryan’s… road map represents the starting point in what could be a serious negotiation about entitlements and spending.”
The translation of that is “Let’s not talk about whether his ideas make sense– let’s talk about whether he might become a Very Serious Person.” It brings to mind Tim Matheson to John Vernon in Animal House.
Obviously Ryan can become a player if The Village continues to cover Ryan the person respectfully and never says his ideas make as little sense as Rand Paul’s.
The key section is this one:
The Newspaper of Record just published the first salvo in what will shortly become a Village jihad to get Obama and Ryan in bed together. “Hey, you’re both smart and you both like to talk about the budget. Why don’t you two guys have a couple of pitchers, do some ex– who knows what might happen?”
The Broder article almost writes itself. “Ryan might be a cross between Dr. Strangelove and Bobo the Sipleminded, but seasoned politicians know that a true leader governs with the opposition he has, not the one he would like. If Obama is serious about bipartisanship on economic issues, Ryan offers his best chance.”
A few months from now, if the Democrats lose any seats, it will become “Now that Obama’s socialistic ideas have been totally refudiated by every American voter, the question becomes “Is he serious about ending the gridlock or will he continue to kowtow to the ‘professional left’?””
And I think we can all guess how the Rahm-Obama-Lama-Ding-Dongs will react. If they were Cheese-Eating Legislative Surrender Monkeys when they received a mandate, how the hell will they react when they have a setback? One wonders if they’ll say “OK, you can repeal three amendments to the constitution, but only one from 1-10, one from 11-20 and one from 21 up.”
As is usual, Paul Krugman seems to be the only sane person out there. The correct way to handle this is to stomp hard on Ryan and deny him any air. The more ground he gets, the harder it is to avoid dealing with him.
This is how Newt Gingrich became powerful in the 1980’s– nobody thought it was necessary to ice him until it was too late to do so.
NobodySpecial
Matt Bai in that same article described Lieberman as a Democrat.
He must be permanently thinking it’s 2000 and he’s 12 again.
arguingwithsignposts
What Clinton and Gingrich demonstrated was that they both could get blow jobs. This entire article is not reporting at all. What a tool.
arguingwithsignposts
No, because Ryan isn’t any kind of ideologue himself.
Nick
And by tolerable consensus, Bai means shutting down the fucking government until one of them blinks. Right?
Anne Laurie
@Belvoir:
And this, mind you, is the smart Bush. He’s the one who’s got long-term experience living in an actual banana republic (Venezula), so he knows exactly what he’s talking about: A society where a small elite lives very, very nicely — at the expense of the all the maids, laborers, mill hands, and other inconsequential people, who can’t expect to eat every day, unless they’re “lucky” enough to get the scraps from their wealthy employers’ meals.
Jeb! / Say-rah 2016… because Real America(tm) wants all its worst Republican archetypes in one tidy, toxic package!
P.S. Matt Bai is famous for being one of the most idiotic of the Media Village idiots, which is no doubt why Jeb! felt comfortable sharing his thots so freely, I suspect.
Moses2317
Mr. Bai’s article is a textbook case of what is wrong with journalism in America today. Fortunately, he will be answering questions that are submitted in the comments here. I urge you all to do so.
I submitted the following:
Mr. Bai,
I am disappointed by the failure of this article to provide readers with useful information regarding the validity of Congressman Ryan’s proposal or the state of relationships between the Democrats and Republicans in Washington D.C.
You note that Mr. Krugman has criticized the Ryan plan, but give us no idea as to who might be right. For example, you mention that Mr. Krugman says that “the tax cuts in [Ryan’s] plan would ultimately make the debt worse,” but do nothing to evaluate if that argument is true. Having read Mr. Krugman and other’s analyses, the statement clearly is true – Ryan’s “plan” is nothing but a sham proposal that relies on flawed voodoo economic theories to pretend that it is a roadmap to a balanced budget. But your article does not even address the issue or provide anything beyond he-said, she-said regarding the validity of the plan. If you are going to propose that a popularly elected Democratic Preisdent negotiate with an unpopular Republican Congressman who wants to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare in the name of balancing the budget, shouldn’t you at least discuss whether the Republican’s plan has any validity to it?
Similarly, you note that President Obama’s “relationships with Republican leaders might best be described as estranged,” but you provide no inkling of why those relationships are estranged. President Obama and the Democrats have bent over backwards to try to be bipartisan – making the stimulus package far smaller than it should have been and loading it up with ineffectual revenue reductions instead of more effective spending, removing the public option from the health care reform bill, nominating moderate Supreme Court Justices, negotiating for months with Sen. Scott Brown and others on financial reform, etc. etc. The Republicans have responded with historically unprecedented obstructionism – filibsutering virtually every piece of legislation that is proposed, refusing to vote on a multitude of fully qualified nominees for judgeships and governmental positions, and parroting the worst rhetoric and conspiracy theories of the tea party base of the Republican party. The evidence is overwhelming that the “estranged” relationship between President Obama and the Republicans is due to the fact that the Republicans refuse to act in good faith. But your article treats it as if it is just something that has happened out of the blue, thereby letting the Republicans off the hook for their truly egregious behavior.
I don’t expect or want reporters to be biased one way or the other. But if a journalist’s job is to help the American public be informed and educated about what is going on, then reporters have to be willing to objectively evaluate competing claims and decide which side appears to have the weight of the evidence in its favor. At a minimum, a journalist should provide the information and context necessary for the public to evaluate competing claims. The media’s continued failure to do that does a disservice to the American public and to our democracy.
Yutsano
@Anne Laurie:
I believe that’s called the modern Republican economic plan. Ryan’s
bullshit pseudo-intellectualismplan is nothing more than a means to that goal. It doesn’t HAVE to make sense or be logical, it just needs to be enacted so that the true social order can be restored.Ruckus
The only upside here is that I’ve always admired someone who will tell me up front that they are going to fuck me as they are holding me down and taking off my pants instead of me having to wait for that loving feeling in my ass.
Some how it makes me think they care.
/snark, just in case it wasn’t clear.
YellowJournalism
@Nick: Not to Godwin, but…
Good thing Adolf Hitler didn’t deliver their newspapers.
JGabriel
@Kryptik: Thanks, managed to get it fixed while I still had editing privileges. You must have caught it in that 3 minute or so window before I repaired it.
.
MikeJ
@Moses2317: Bwahaha! You seem to think a question about facts and data that takes 500 words to ask will get through a screening.
If you want to get a question through, ask “Why are Republicans/Democrats such poopyheads?” Short, partisan, addressing nothing of any substance.
Phil
Less than three months left until electoral disaster for all of you. Tick tock tick tock.
Oh and speaking of electoral disaster, Great Leader’s poll numbers are sinking faster than the Titanic.
http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/jobapproval-obama.php
And make no mistake about it, we’ll be reminding the voting public each and every day that all of you were cheerleading him on along the way.
And if you ever criticized him, it was because you didn’t think he was liberal enough. Which we’ll also be reminding the voting public of each and every day until the election.
Tick tock tick tock.
asiangrrlMN
@Moses2317: Wonderful. No chance in hell of being answered, but a great comment, nonetheless.
@Yutsano: Hi, hon. How is Mr. Softshell doing?
@Nick: That’s fucked-up man about the gentleman from New York (Weiner). Seriously. You vote for someone because you know his daughter-in-law?
In my state, I want instant run-off voting. There have been times I’ve wanted to vote third party but haven’t because, well, like I said, we got Ratface Pawlenty that way. If, however, I could vote for a third party candidate and know that my vote will default to the Dem candidate, I would be satisfied with that.
Spaghetti Lee
Argh argh argh. Why is the NYT taking this hack so seriously? He is so full of shit it’s not even funny. And count me in the group who thought that Jeb was trying to attack Paul by saying this.
MikeJ
@Spaghetti Lee:
Because he makes sure that nobody could accuse him of having a liberal bias, even if it means omitting facts.
SRW1
Can’t believe that monkeyboy @23 was the only one to point out the significance of the broccoli/Bush family combination.
For a history crash course:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIKmp-Ualzg
The Truffle
@Phil: Things they do look awful cold. Hope I die before I get trolled.
Frank L
Woodrow L. Goode IV @41
I think of Dean Wormer’s immortal statement to Flounder, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son”. Of course, Flounder then threw up on Dean Wormer
Frank
Silly me, I thought we were the richest country in the world. Apparently not if I am to believe our previous President’s brother.
BTW – A few years ago there was a study quoted in right-wing sites claiming that the poorest blacks in the South still made more money than the middle class in Sweden.
I have visited Sweden. I can assure you that their middle class not only eat food EVERY day. They also get to have steak.
Nick
@Frank:
Oh but we are, we’re rich ad powerful and if you just dream and work hard, you’ll get to see that wealth. Ronald Reagan said so! And he defeated Communism!
Equal Opportunity Cynic
@MikeJ: @Moses2317:
What MikeJ said. I too need to learn to express myself more tersely.
Sirkowski
Let them eat some fucking cake.
Honus
@matt: Hell, take a look at Great Republican Thinker Newt Gingrich’s educational background. He’s basically an infomercial-level carnival barker intellect. And I apologize for insulting the integrity of carnival barkes.
BC
I don’t think the Jeb Bush quote was meant to be taken literally, as people have to eat broccoli, then not eat for several days, and do without steak forever. I think Jeb was saying the federal budget slashing would be the conservative wet dream – just the veggies, maybe nothing for awhile, but for sure no health care, no social security, none of that good stuff the liberals always want. But I think if we could just make that what the Republicans want for the US, then so be it. Jeb shouldn’t say shit that can be taken out of context (and he will run in 2016).
chopper
“let them eat
cakenothing!”