Maybe Sullivan is just intimidated by all the numbers, so let’s try to build a scenario even a third-grader could understand. Here is my attempt:
Mom, dad, and a bill collector are sitting at a table. Mom and dad owe a lot of money, and have spent the last couple years arguing about it. Mom has ten dollars on the table in front of her, and so does dad, and they need to decide how much each has to give to the bill collector while still being able to live.
In walks Paul Ryan, one of dad’s buddies. He says “Hey- I’ve got a great idea to fix your problems and pay off the bill collector, but you have to trust me.” Mom and dad are hesitant, but agree, because everyone knows that Paul Ryan is a very serious person, a thinking man’s thinker, with all sorts of awesome solutions and a square jawline and piercing blue eyes.
Ryan then says- “Ok. The first thing that needs to be done is I need Mom to give me half her money.” Mom is skeptical, but says ok, and hands Ryan five dollars.
Instead of giving mom’s money to the bill collector, Ryan then immediately hands the five dollars to Dad and says “Ok. Now that that is done, we need to figure out how to pay the bill collector. I’m going to suggest you two make a bunch of unspecified lifestyle changes that will cut what you owe the bill collector in the future. I’ll leave that up to you, but you aren’t going to be allowed to take any money out of your home security budget. Also, we’re not really going to pay anything to the bill collector right now, but that is ok, because since mom gave dad that five bucks, I promise you that in ten years you both will making a whole lot more money and then you can pay the bill collector. Yes, I know that mom will be really hurting for money and won’t be able to pay for her bills, but that is your problem. Some basic cruelty is necessary because the math demands it.”
Ryan is then met with a standing ovation from Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, and many of dad’s bestest friends for his very serious ideas.
That’s what the “very serious” Paul Ryan/GOP Path to Prosperity does.
cleek
and if mom opens her fucking mouth one more time, dad’s gonna pack up his shit, get the fuck out of this hellhole, and move to where he is appreciated!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Do you need a 12 step program? I can give you my paypal address if you do. Heh.
Good point, though.
Trinity
THIS.
Dave
You just need a metaphor for the historically-low unemployment rate that drives Ryan’s budget. That really does deserve it’s own Spotlight of Stupidity.
Tim, Interrupted
OMG, Cole. You are so in love with Sullivan it’s disgusting. Well…he DOES have those “power glutes” going for him.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
you forgot the thoughtfully wrinkled brow of a Serious Thinker and the virile wave in his youthful curly full head of black hair.
Sully prolly wet-dreams in him a beard.
Noonan
You left out the part where Ryan first makes mom and dad take a blood oath to the fact that climate change ain’t real and abortions ain’t happening.
batgirl
I just want to say how nice it is that I can go read TNC at the Atlantic without being tempted by Sully. Now only if McMegan would leave.
Sentient Puddle
@Dave: Oh that one’s easy. Ryan promises mom and dad that they’ll get a unicorn in ten years.
Gin & Tonic
An entire Internet. Are there no other writers to respond to?
dmsilev
@Dave: My understanding is that the apparatchiks at the
Ministry of TruthHeritage Foundation have retroactively edited the report so that those inconvenient numbers have never existed.dms
"Serious" Superluminar
Look Cole, is this some kind of meta-spoof thing referencing m_c/HGWs stalking of EDK or something? If so, well done.
PreservedKillick
Seems simple enough to me.
You owe a lot of money and you are in debt, you need to pay it off. You should probably earn more money and cut your spending.
Cutting taxes equates to earning less money.
Ultimately, Ryan is counseling the debtor to earn less money.
Good plan.
Scott
Ehh, Mom and Dad are basically on the same team here anyway. If it was Mom and Dad and their neighbors, the Rockefeller heirs, then we’d be working on a killer analogy…
aimai
I think its quite a bit worse than this description.
Mom and Dad have three children, one of whom is sick and two of whom are in public school. They’ve been working hard and saving for years, paying into Medicare, Medicaid, SS and etc… while also paying their share of their health care. Dad loses his job and decides that what he wants is to divorce mom and start a new life with a woman who works for a debt collection agency. He no longer thinks he should have to pay child support, and he doesn’t want to keep paying cobra payments for his wife and the kid’s health care. He moves to a gated community in another state and refuses to pay property taxes to support the kid’s schools. Paul Ryan shows up and agrees that the most sensible thing for everyone to do is for mom and the kids to starve and go without either education or health care while Dad starts up his new life as a debt collector for rich people who lives in a gated community in a state with low taxes and no services.
aimai
SimplyOn
This one is good too:
http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2011/04/car-talk-with-paul-ryan.html
Julia Grey
Sullivan NEEDS to be pummelled on his support of the mythological Ryan plan, which all of a sudden has made the notion of eliminating Medicare not only thinkable, but “respectable”????
Sullivan is driving opinion in a high visibility forum, and it’s clear he’s utterly delusional on this matter. Some slapping around is required.
Ronc99
The continued LOVE/HATE affair between John Cole & Sully has worn out its welcome. Both of you are insufferable corporatists, so just get over yourselves. Life ain’t about what you two think or do :)
Joe Beese
@Gin & Tonic:
Seriously, Mr. Cole. We’re going to have to stage an intervention or something.
Here’s a Home of Hamsher post you can growl at instead:
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/04/07/quantico-blocks-official-visits-by-un-amnesty-and-rep-kucinich-to-bradley-manning/
Lolis
green balloons
dmsilev
@Gin & Tonic:
This is what happens when a bracket goes bad. Count your blessings; the other finalist was Anne Althouse.
dms
NonyNony
@aimai:
That analogy works, except that the only endgame I see is the kids picking up the guns that dad left behind when he walked out and storming the gated community to take a pound of flesh out of their deadbeat dad.
kdaug
@Julia Grey:
Agreed 100%.
Sully’s not a rigid ideologue – he’s shown he can change his mind (much like Cole), given the right arguments.
It’s our job to provide him with them.
Zifnab
@aimai: This sounds a bit closer.
Toss in “Ryan tells dad to raid mom’s 401(k) and pension to fund the move, then scolds mom for not having a retirement plan and suggests she be punished by having her salary cut and her insurance stripped and if she even thinks about talking to the other moms across the street about organizing to protest that she should be shot on sight and thrown in a shallow grave.”
fasteddie9318
Assuming you mean “Mom” and “Dad” as analogies to the two parties, this would work better if Mom was a mid-level corporate manager at a financial services firm and Dad was a bug-eating coke freak who spent his days shitting in his own hands and smearing it on himself and passersby.
Darius
John, you just don’t understand. Ryan’s plan is a good thing because, in Sullivan’s own words, it will “inflict sacrifice on many Americans”. Got it?
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
It’s just missing the part where mom cleans Paul Ryan’s clock and a chastened dad returns her $5 and assures her that Ryan was never one of his favorite buddies anyway.
Culture of Truth
Obama, Biden and Reid are going to lean on Boehner in half an hour.
magurakurin
I for one enjoy the Sullivan bashing. That’s what a Double A blog team is for anyway. To the folks who are bitching about too much Sullivan bashing, I say, go fuck yourselves..oh wait, that’a bit harsh, how about “go write your own blog or take a break from this one,” or even better, don’t read the post. I never read the soccer posts or dog posts here, but I still enjoy the stuff I do read. And I’m not the least bit bothered or troubled by the ones I don’t read…you know, because I didn’t read them. That’s the beauty of having free will. Fucking use it, why don’t ya?
Martin
I think it’s curious that many of the people that are critical of Obama for not bringing in sweeping ‘rewrite all of the rules’ change are suddenly mystified that others are in love with Ryan’s sweeping ‘rewrite all of the rules’ proposal. Ryan is doing for the GOP what Beese is pissed at Obama for not doing for Democrats.
If you want radical change, this is what it looks like. Sully wants radical change and so he’s going to slobber over whoever brings it – left or right. He believes that the solution to America is to walk into every problem as though you’re willing to rewrite the Constitution in order to solve it. That’s fairly commonly done around the world. America is quite an outlier in that regard with our pathological creeping incrementalism.
So Brooks and Beese and Sully are all the same animal. I’m not sure if they really care if any problems actually get solved by this approach, but boy do they love it when people bring the big ideas.
cleek
@Darius:
that’s not quite fair.
he says:
in other words: Ryan doesn’t sugar-coat the GOP’s position. if people like it, then they like it. but if they don’t, they at least know where the GOP really stands.
Martin
@Culture of Truth: Won’t help. Boehner is almost powerless here.
freelancer
I was ready to self-immolate yesterday with the Cole/Sully marathon. Today, I’m back in. You grab the rake, I’ll warm up the coals.
joes527
@Julia Grey: meh.
Sully is blogfodder. Nothing more. Now that he has moved to his new digs he is doubly irrelevant. Those who will agree with him no matter what will agree with him. Those who won’t wont. And hardly another soul will even hear what he has to say.
David Brooks, on the other hand, makes his living shovelling this shit out to the masses, dressed up in a brooks brothers suit, an oh-so-wry sense of humour, and a demeanour that just screams: “I AM BEING REASONABLE!!!!”
Sully is inside baseball. Brooks is the one that needs to be publicly taken on.
benintn
@cleek:
= Bingo.
We live in a country that rewards dads who abandon their kids and trade in their wives for a younger model. And that is EXACTLY what’s going on here with the GOP budget hostage-taking.
Bob
Shared sacrifice…of 95% of the population. That’s within margin of error right?
joes527
@Martin:
Are you dismissing the power of tears?
daveNYC
@dmsilev: Other than as screenshots at many other blogs.
The greatest thing about the efforts of their MiniTrue department is that even though they jacked up the expected unemployment rate to 4.3%, nothing else changed in the model. They’re not even trying to hide the fact that they’re just making up the numbers.
Poopyman
@cleek: Am I the only one that gets hung up by those two words, “inflict sacrifice?” That’s a telling phrase if I ever heard one.
batgirl
@Culture of Truth: I suppose one could feel sorry for Boehner — he is screwed whichever way he goes. Deal, he pisses off the Tea Party, aka the GOP base. No deal, he pisses off the independents (at least in a sane world where the media isn’t a GOP lackey.) As I said, I suppose one could, but I don’t. Cry, Boehner, cry.
catclub
Well, if Einstein were explaining it, he would end with,
“… except there is no kitchen table.”
Plus he had wonderful frizzy hair. All in all, much preferable to Paul Ryan.
Carol from CO
And it would pay to be very seriously concerned about ryan’s proposals given the crop of Dems in Congress and the Oval Office.
Lurking Canadian
@Poopyman: To be “serious” is to have the courage to watch other people suffer as you sip your after-dinner mint julep.
piratedan
@Poopyman: yeah kinda negates the idea and concept behind what a sacrifice is. Perhaps as couched as “my non-negotiable terms” would have met the required clarity parameters.
cleek
@Poopyman:
nope. they sounded pretty ominous to me, too. but i think the last clause of the next sentence pulled him out of what i thought was going to be a spectacular moral nose dive.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Sullivan has had a thing about ending entitlements for decades, and not because such programs are ineffective, but just because he is philosophically opposed to them. Most of what he wants is neither radical, nor much in the way of change.
I’m not sure what you are getting at here. Where is rewriting constitutions commonly done, and where with purpose or success?
Midnight Marauder
By far, the most realistic aspect of the entire scenario.
catclub
@cleek: “because for the first time, the GOP has essentially owned and fessed up to the human costs of fiscal reform.”
He left out:
… NONE of which are borne by people as wealthy or wealthier than Paul Ryan.
aimai
@Zifnab:
Yeah, I think of my little parable as a starting point. I didn’t include that Mom is a unionized nurse who put dad through law school and then he left to get his MBA and become a hedge fund manager…
I was also influenced by the recent Salon article (too lazy to link) from the woman whose father was a Randian and a) refused to pay child support and b) asked her to emancipate herself at 15 so she could “work for him in his business” and “support herself.”
aimai
NonyNony
@batgirl:
Yeah. Boehner wanted the job so I can’t feel the least bit sorry for him.
I admit feel a little weirded out when I see him cry – I don’t have a problem with men crying but damn, he seems to cry at EVERYTHING. We’re not talking ‘my mom died and so I’m brought to tears’, we’re talking ‘I just had a thought about a cute kitten and how it might not have any food tonight and so I can’t control my weeping’ level stuff here.
And there are rumors that he broke down into tears during the last meeting at the White House. So I think the man might want to seek some help – he might be repressing something that a good shrink might help him get out. Maybe he’s not actually cut out to be a Republican politician and it’s truly eating him up inside.
aimai
@catclub:
Also, as usual, I’m arguing with a randroid over at Annie’s Mailbox about Ryan’s actual budget and I’m sorry to report that when ideology fogs the picture even watching Ryan skull fuck a kitten in front of its screaming, ten year old girl owner, doesn’t make it clear to the average right wing american that the Republican position is *now lets kill all the sick people.* These are people who are congenitally dishonest about their own philosophy. Randianism is not a utilitarian philosophy. It doesn’t posit the greatest good for the greatest number. It aims at the exaltation of the strong individual over everyone else. So any Randian “solution” to a group problem must, be definition, be terrible because it doesn’t begin from the need to help the group. It starts with denying any meaningful moral status to *every individual other than the speaker or, in this case, the legislator and his class*. But this woman I’m arguing with can’t face up to that reality. She persists in offering piecmeal arguments like “Paul is simply attempting to give each individual the right to withdraw from social security payments” or something weird like that.
aimai
Paul in KY
@aimai: Wondering if you posted there as ‘Amity’, a commenter who I admire?
tkogrumpy
@aimai: I have never seen one word under your handle that wasn’t innovative, Laser clear, right on point, and well worth my time. Hat’s off to a first class mind.
eemom
another earthquake hit Japan. Reid says we’re heading for a shutdown. NATO planes reportedly killed more rebels in Libya.
And John Cole remains fixated on Andrew fucking Sullivan.
Much as I hate like hell to agree with Tim, well….
RGuy
Don’t forget, Ryan also took control of Mom’s uterus somewhere in that scenario.
sukabi
John, John, John… hhhhhmmmmmmmmm….. Sully won’t be moved by your attempt to explain Ryan’s plan and here’s why…
1) there is no wealthy person in that room that gets Mom’s money, so what you’re proposing is a simple redistr!bution of Mom’s wealth to Dad … that’s e^il soc!al1sm (Dad isn’t part of the Important People group, if he were he wouldn’t be having “cash flow” problems.
2) there is no avenue in your plan for transferring Mom & Dad’s money to a wealthy individual…
3) and you didn’t include a punishment for Mom & Dad for becoming this poor in the first place.
4) there is no mention of cuts to any social programs that Mom & Dad may qualify for — this is definitely a requirement for “serious plan” status
5) and they can’t really be poor, because they are having this discussion at their kitchen table… which implies they have a house —
6) ^ see they aren’t really hurting so what’s the problem?
catclub
@tkogrumpy: In the reviews for Mozart and PDQ Bach (as described by Peter Schickele). “Hats Off, gentlemen, a genius… Hats back on, gentlemen, an idiot.”
tkogrumpy
@freelancer: See #29 above.
catclub
@eemom: “And John Cole remains fixated on Andrew fucking Sullivan.”
Who is this Andrew and does he have a newsletter?
sukabi
moderation hell? really???
John, John, John… hhhhhmmmmmmmmm….. Sully won’t be moved by your attempt to explain Ryan’s plan and here’s why…
1) there is no wealthy person in that room that gets Mom’s money, so what you’re proposing is a simple redistr!bution of Mom’s wealth to Dad … that’s e^il soc!al1sm (Dad isn’t part of the Important People group, if he were he wouldn’t be having “cash flow” problems.
2) there is no avenue in your plan for transferring Mom & Dad’s money to a wealthy individual…
3) and you didn’t include a punishment for Mom & Dad for becoming this poor in the first place.
4) there is no mention of cuts to any soc!al programs that Mom & Dad may qualify for—this is definitely a requirement for “serious plan” status
5) and they can’t really be poor, because they are having this discussion at their kitchen table… which implies they have a house—
6) ^ see they aren’t really hurting so what’s the problem?
Comrade Luke
This is great John, are you going on Bill Maher to talk more about it?
no?
Because Sullivan is.
We’re losing.
Tractarian
See, that’s the problem. The fact that the Ryan plan eviscerates the social safety net makes people think that, if anything, it’s honest and not sugar-coated. But it is sugar-coated! It’s made with phony numbers, ludicrous projections, and it postpones any debt reduction until decades down the road. It is carefully constructed so as not to offend rich white seniors, the GOP’s most reliable voters.
And the sugar-coating is necessary. Without all of that, people would see the plan for what it really is: a Tea Party ideological wish-list, with no realistic prospect for debt reduction.
Comrade Javamanphil
@kdaug:
Do you have proof of this because I don’t see it? The only thing I remember him changing his mind about was Iraq and then only after (long after) it was clear that the whole thing was a fools errand. Otherwise he plays this game of appearing to be reasonable and consider all sides and then miraculously concludes that his opinions on the subject were right all along.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
FTFY.
Julia Grey
Not to be too rude, but that could be because being born and raised a Brit he doesn’t have a soul-deep commitment to the American Constitution in the first place, or even the concept of a single formal constitution.
Crackity Jones
Sully is to Cole as Palin is to Sully.
Not that this isn’t more enjoyable than the Palin obsession.
sukabi
@Julia Grey: that may be true about Sully… but HOW do you explain our Teabaggers? They only like selectively chosen passages of our constitution, and want to rewrite the rest to suit themselves.
Wolfdaughter
@benintn:
Bu-bu-but, it’s the liberals who started the deadbeat dad thing. With the Great Society, doncha know?
laughingriver
The thread that runs through it from beginning to end is that Sully does not believe that the government should provide medical care for anyone, period end of discussion. Ryan’s plans is a means to that end which is why Sully thinks it is serious. Of course he won’t come out and say it as none of the republicans will either, but that’s it in a nutshell.
There are so many ways to balance the budget without getting rid of Medicare or Medicaid, but he has not embraced any of them as serious precisely because they don’t eliminate government provided healthcare…
One of you FP’ers, challenge him on that would you?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Noonan:
Fix’tBroke it some more for ya.aimai
@Paul in KY:
No, I always post as Aimai, though sometimes its capitalized and sometimes its not. I do have my very own stalker on the Annie’s Mailbox blog (there’s a claim to fame that is somewhat…not) who posts as amai so on top of being rude they seem to have trouble spelling.
aimai
Wolfdaughter
@aimai:
Yes, and the Randians posting letters on that thread insisted that her father was just a selfish asshole. NOTHING to do with the fact that he is a Rand devotee. (Granted, I think Rand appeals most to young men, and a few young women, because at that age we are predisposed to be somewhat selfish. Most of us outgrow it, though.)
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Lolis: Win.
eemom
@Comrade Luke:
the number of people who watch Bill Maher may be marginally higher than the number of people other than John Cole who give a shit what Sullivan thinks, but it’s not remotely high enough to make a difference to anything.
We are not “losing” because of Sullivan or Maher.
This is pure insanity.
Roger Moore
@sukabi:
That’s part and parcel of the Fundamentalist attitude toward textual analysis. They like to pretend that they care deeply for the text they fetishize, but they don’t in any meaningful sense. Instead, they start with a preset idea of what they want out of it. They then talk about the parts that support what they believe, misinterpret parts that can be misinterpreted to support them, and ignore or invent specious arguments for the irrelevance of the rest. It’s how they read the bible, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that they do the same thing to the Constitution.
Julia Grey
Reminds me of the time when my son got hold of some nonsense on the internet and said that he was now in favor of returning to the “original” constitution, as it was written in 1789, “without any amendments, because those perverted what the framers wanted it to say and do.”
He was very upset when I had to tell him that doing away with all the amendments would, among other things, eliminate his mom’s right to vote. I didn’t have the heart to go on to tell him that the Bill of Rights consists of the first 10 Amendments to that “original constitution.”
(Oh, and my daughter came in the other day with some non-scientific garbage one of her girlfriends told her and when I tried to tell her she was wrong, she insisted it was true because she had “looked it up.” Where? “On the internet!” ::face palm::)
Calouste
@Julia Grey:
Some say he is delusional, others would say he’s in the tank and driving the narrative.
agorabum
I feel like one thing that keeps getting forgotten, is that not only have we had budgets in recent memory with low deficits, we had honest to god surpluses.
Want a good budget? See the Bill Clinton budget of 1999.
What is there?
Higher taxes on the rich.
Less military spending.
Voila.
We were still cashing in a bit on that whole ‘peace dividend’ from the end of the cold war.
We had our welfare reform in the 90s. Now we need a warfare/welfare reform.
Fixed!
Another alternative: think of what the republicans pushed for from 2000-2008. Then do the opposite. That will probably work pretty good too.
eemom
….and, the usual ‘tards are right on schedule with accusations of “fraud” in the Wisconsin election.
But by all means, let’s keep talking about what some expat British asshole who no one outside the blogosphere has ever fucking heard of thinks about the Ryan “plan.”
Tsulagi
Damn, Cole, you got a real hardon for Sullivan. You need to quit him.
Paul in KY
@aimai: I think I generally see your posts in Greenwald’s threads (now that I think about it). Thank you for responding. Admire your writing as well :-)
Niques
@sukabi:
Same way they treat the Bible.
Joe
I sometimes think that Andrew Sullivan does not have ideas per se; he has enthusiasms. This is why he is being constantly disappointed by politicians — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, John McCain, and now, perhaps, Barak Obama. For an individual who prides himself upon his purported independence, Sullivan is routinely prey to what could be called political crushes. Ryan is merely the latest object of his passion. PS: As far as I can tell, Sullivan knows little about economics other than a few Thatcherite cliches.
Turgidson
yawn. Sullivan is still a clown? Yep. :::back to sleep:::
His whole “I love how serious this is even though I hate what’s actually in it” schtick suggests that several months of patient explanation to him that he’s wrong might do the trick and he’ll become sane on this topic too – this is how all of his conversions begin. But I just don’t care.
If he had actual honest-to-god intellectual honesty on the topic, he’d have dismissed Ryan as a charlatan when he presented his roadmap (to the Gilded Age or worse) last year. I know I haven’t taken a word he’s said seriously since then. This budget is more or less the same fucking thing, only, somehow, even worse.
Citizen Alan
While the Sully fixation is tedious, it could be worse: at least David-Fucking-Broder is dead and in Hell, so we don’t have to listen to rubbish about how the Ryan plan is better than Viagra for his wrinkly old cock.
Roger Moore
@Julia Grey:
Of course the Constitution included an amendment process because the framers wanted it to be able to change. They knew they were fallible and wouldn’t get everything perfect the first time, and even if they had everything right they knew that the system would have to change with changing circumstances. Treating the Constitution as a perfect and unchangeable document like tablets brought down from Mount Sinai is a much worse perversion of the framers’ intent than amending the thing.
burnspbesq
Even Douthat has figured out that Ryan’s proposal is a joke.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/notes-on-the-ryan-budget/
Note Douthat’s error: he says that Ryan’s plan converts Medicare to a “defined benefit.” Actually, it’s worse than that. Ryan’s plan converts Medicare into a defined contribution plan, shifting the risk of inadequate funding onto the recipients.
cleek
@burnspbesq:
Douthat’s playing politics!
Brachiator
@Julia Grey:
Of course, the Constitution would not have been ratified had not the framers agreed to add what became known as the Bill of Rights.
A key point here is that the “framers” just could not drop the Constitution off on the rest of the citizens. Consent of the governed and all that.
Mike M
Well, maybe in the end Ryan’s proposal will be a good thing, if it finally gets Democrats off their ass and fighting for the principles they claim to support. Ryan has finally put down in black and white what the Republican party has tried to achieve for a long time: the end to Medicare and Medicaid as we know them.
There are many Republicans who believe with Calvanist zeal that the poor deserve their lot and that wealth is a signal from on high that Heaven has chosen the rich for eternal salvation and bliss. The Democratic instinct, including my own, is to give the other side the benefit of the doubt and strive for common ground. But sometimes there is no common ground and the other side won’t negotiate because they feel they are on a sacred mission.
I think that it is time that we all say “Enough!” and like the public workers in Wisconsin, take to the streets and to the Capitol, if necessary. And it will be.
RosiesDad
Cole: Bet you can’t go 12 hours without mentioning Sullivan.
Tunch: Claw Cole in the nut sack, please.
malraux
@kdaug:
The problem isn’t that eventually we could convince him that this is a bad plan. It’ll happen eventually I’d bet. The problem is that in 6 months or a year, some other republican, possibly even Ryan himself, will release a virtually identical plan and Sulivan will naively support it just as he does with the current plan.
It’s not that he doesn’t learn, its that he never learns from when he learns.
les
@burnspbesq:
No, Ryan wants defined benefit–vouchers. The problem is, Ryan’s proposed benefit won’t pay for the medical care that is the alleged benefit.
Hob
@cleek: The problem I have with that last sentence is, it assumes that what the GOP is proposing is “fiscal reform”, and that we could benefit from that “reform” if we were willing to pay those tough costs.
If a doctor had proposed to help me with my ingrown toenail by beating the shit out of me with a tire iron, it would be a bit disingenuous to say “well, at least he’s owning and fessing up to the human costs of health care.”
MarkJ
I really can’t figure out why everyone who’s been moaning about the deficit the past couple of years (to his credit, Sully was moaning about it when Bush was in office, too, so for him it’s been more than a couple) is suddenly singing the praises of a proposed budget that makes the deficit worse.
I understand that it’s “courageous” to inflict pain on the little people, but you’d think they’d at least hold out for a plan that actually reduces the deficit. But no, it can make the deficit worse and still draw praise because it inflicts pain on the poor.
uptown
And this what today’s reality is like:
Mom and dad are sitting at a table. Mom and dad owe a lot of money, but they’ve always made their minimum payments on time. So dad picks one of the many special offers that they have received, offering to transfer their high interest rate balances to an almost zero interest rate. This allows them to make smaller payments or increase the amount they are paying off each month.
*True story. Kids, make your minimum payments on time and the financial world will always love you. Just like they love the USA’s debt. Where else are they going to invest their money?
driftglass
@joes527:
Here, here, although the same pesticide works on both.
alwhite
This has nothing to do with Sully’s sexuality – Sully is a cocksucker. He sucks the cock of those who he thinks will do him the most good. If liberals suddenly took control of all the levers of power and spewed the short of bullshit our ‘conservative’ friends are spewing Sully would be sucking it up and swallowing like at $2 Kansas City hooker. I would not read him then either.
It continue to expect anything better of him is a sign of mental illness. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
jcricket
Mom and dad are sitting at the table with their kids explaining how dad got laid off and they can’t afford health care anymore. The banks come to take the house (even though it’s not the bank they pay the mortgage to). Then the repo man takes the family car, and someone uses mom’s CC to rack up a bunch of bills on stuff they never see.
Then Republicans say “see, this is why the government shouldn’t help you to begin with, and you should have armed yourself. Oh, and tough noogs on the identify theft – shouldn’t have had any credit cards in your financial situation.”
As far as I can tell, this story makes as much sense as the Ryan plan.
Turgidson
@MarkJ:
Because a lot of the people moaning about the deficit don’t actually give a shit about it. They just see it as a useful scary diversion while the GOP steals as much loot as they can out of the treasury and eviscerates the safety net they so abhor.
Sullivan, I think, really does care about the deficit. Or thinks he does. Which makes his appalling idiocy on the issue more frustrating than say, Bobo, who truly doesn’t care about the deficit and is just a reasonable-looking shill for the GOP’s extremism.
jake the snake
I have a very serious question for the very serious Rep. Paul Ryan. When you fellate the Koch brothers, do you spit or swallow? I think he is enough of an authoritarian follower to be glad to swallow.
Kane
@Darius: Is it even possible to inflict sacrifice? One can inflict damage and pain and punishment, but sacrifice is something offered or forfeited or relinquished.
Maybe Sullivan doesn’t have the stomach to say what Ryan is proposing to inflict.