I don’t know if don’t know if any of you noticed – what with all the important discussion you had last week about how Tod Akin and Niall Ferguson have teeny, tiny balls and no dicks – but Maureen Dowd really, really hates Paul Ryan, with a ferocity which suggests either that he dumped her three hours before the prom or, more likely perhaps, didn’t call after that blowjob under the bleachers at Homecoming.
Now, we all know that in a few months Maureen will go back to stealing people’s lunch money and mocking Democrats for being nancy lah lahs and pooves, but when the queen bitch of the school gets her claws out at someone other than you it’s worth savouring.
He’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in. He has a winning air of sad cheerfulness. He’s affable, clean cut and really cut, with the Irish altar-boy widow’s peak and droopy, winsome blue eyes and unashamed sentimentality.
Who better to rain misery upon the heads of millions of Americans?
He’s Scrooge disguised as a Pickwick, an ideologue disguised as a wonk. Not since Ronald Reagan tried to cut the budget by categorizing ketchup and relish as vegetables has the G.O.P. managed to find such an attractive vessel to mask harsh policies with a smiling face.
The Young Gun and former prom king is a fan of deer hunting, catfish noodling, heavy metal and Beethoven. He’s a great dad who says the cheese, bratwurst and beer of Wisconsin flow in his veins. He’s so easy to like — except that his politics are just a teensy bit heartless.
Rush Limbaugh hails Ryan as “the last Boy Scout,” noting that the tall, slender 42-year-old is a true believer: “We now have somebody on the ticket who’s us.”
Maureen then proceeds to describe Ryan as “like a friendly guidance counselor who wants to teach us how to live, get us in shape, PowerPoint away the social safety net to make the less advantaged more self-reliant, as he makes the rich richer”. She smears his particular brand of prudish, hypocritical pseudo-Randianiam all over him and it’s good, although her heart doesn’t really seem to be in it until she lets fly in her last few paragraphs:
Although the Catholic Ryan told Fox News’s Brit Hume in an interview that aired Tuesday night that he “completely disagreed” with Rand’s “atheistic philosophy,” he said his interest in economics was “triggered” by her.
His long infatuation with her makes him seem even younger than he looks with his cowlick because Randism is a state of arrested adolescence, making its disciples feel like heroic teenagers atop a lofty mountain peak.
The secretive, ambiguous Romney was desperate for ideological clarity, so he outsourced his political identity to Ryan, a numbers guy whose numbers don’t add up.
This just proves that Romney will never get over his anxiety about not being conservative enough. As president, he’d still feel the need to prove himself with right-wing Supreme Court picks.
Ryan should stop being so lovable. People who intend to hurt other people should wipe the smile off their faces.
Now, aside from the florid prose (something about which I am hardly permitted to complain) and the ridiculous suggestion that Romney would have the slightest hesitation before appointing someone to the right of Antonin Scalia’s older, crankier brother Fredo to the Supreme Court, I thought that was a pretty good effort. Well worth reading, especially as the page ends with those most wonderful words “Thomas L. Friedman is off today.”
However, one week later it becomes clear that Maureen was just warming up.
Tom Morello, the Grammy-winning, Harvard-educated guitarist for the metal rap band Rage Against the Machine, punctured Paul Ryan’s pretensions to cool in a Rolling Stone essay rejecting R&R (Romney ’n’ Ryan) as R&R (rock ’n’ roll).
“He is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades,” Morello writes, adding: “I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta ‘rage’ in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically, the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.”
In my experience, when a presidential candidate needs some outside force to animate him — Michael Dukakis needed Kitty, Bob Dole needed C-Span, Willard needs Paul — it spells doom.
The fresh Gen X vice-presidential contender — like Sarah Palin, he favors the exclamation “awesome” — has had mixed reviews in his debutante cotillion.
Now that is quality bitchiness. Notice how she pivots off the Morello quote, with a perfect non sequitur (Romney as automaton) with double loser (Romney is Dole and, gasp, Dukakis – she’ll be calling him History’s Greatest Monster before the month is out), and then straight into a fine “My, isn’t he young?” with added Palin, and then sticks the dismount with that wonderfully nasty “debutante cotillion”.
I may have watched too much gymnastics during the Olympics, by the way.
You can tell Maureen is enjoying herself. There is blood on the mats, and the screaming of the crowd and the whimper of her victim in her ears. She goes in for the kill with her bluntest knives.
Howard Fineman wrote in The Huffington Post that “Ryan turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be a purifying ideologue, but rather a young, power-hungry, ladder-climbing trimmer.” The self-styled deficit cutter backed W.’s deficit-exploding agenda, and the tut-tutting critic of the Obama stimulus grabbed for the president’s stimulus money.
Neocons and Tea Partyers, however, continued to rhapsodize. Grover Norquist told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt that Ryan would be the Dick Cheney of economic and tax policy. And that’s a compliment.
Paul Ryan felt that in the gut.
Note in this next part how masterfully Maureen pauses to namecheck Dan Quayle and the lost Romney-spawn (Pratt Romney?), before returning to her “Paul Ryan is a Dick” thing.
The comparison is apt. Ryan looks like a bonus Romney son, as Dan Quayle did with Bush senior. Republicans find the tableau of two rich white guys — same shirts, different generations — comforting. With W. and Cheney, the usual order switched and the vice-presidential candidate played the role of surrogate dad.
Where Ryan is like Cheney is in tone: at first blush, the Wisconsin congressman emanates a thoughtful, reassuring reasonableness, talking to reporters and sometimes Democratic lawmakers. Cheney’s deep voice, like the headmaster of a boys’ prep school, seemed moderate and measured, too, at first. But it is deceptive. Both men are way, way out there.
It is, to use a phrase coined by French doctors, la belle indifférence, or “the beautiful calm” of hysterical people. But the closer you look, the uglier it gets.
Paul Ryan is an ugly, French Dick Cheney. And a Monet to boot.
Now her victim is on the canvas, Maureen gives up the supple nastiness of the last few sections. Now it’s just close body blows, in under the ribs with the knuckles, one after another:
Just as Cheney, hunter of small birds and old friends, once defended cop-killer bullets and plastic guns that could slip through airport metal detectors, so Ryan, deer hunter, championed concealed guns and curtailing the background check waiting period from three days to one.
Just as Cheney was always willing to cough up money to guerrillas in Nicaragua and Angola but not to poor women whose lives were endangered by their pregnancies, so Ryan helped pay for W.’s endless wars while pushing endless anti-abortion bills, like one undercutting an exemption from the ban on using federal money for abortions in cases of rape or incest, and narrowing the definition of rape to “forcible rape.”
What on earth is nonforcible rape? It’s like saying nonlethal murder. Why redefine acts of aggression against women as non-acts of aggression?
Even Catholic bishops, who had to be dragged toward compassion in the pedophilia scandal, were dismayed at how uncompassionate Ryan’s budget was.
“Even Catholic bishops…” How low have you gone when people are judging you by the standards of Catholic bishops?
I was wondering when we’d get to the Catholics, by the way. Do we catch a glimpse in this next bit, perhaps, of Maureen the starry-eyed school girl – now, older and made cynical by disappointment, spitting out the words as she types, but then, back at Immaculata High, still in the midst of her moist, yet innocent, crush on both Jesus and Father Ryan, the chaplain, who was also a carpenter and so good with a lathe, and who talked about justice and changing the world?
Mitt Romney expects his running mate to help deliver the Catholic vote and smooth over any discomfort among Catholics about Mormonism. (This is the first major-party ticket to go Protestant-less.) Yet after Ryan claimed his budget was shaped by his faith, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops deemed it immoral.
“A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,” the bishops wrote in a letter to Congress.
The Jesuits were even more tart, with one group writing to Ryan that “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The nuns-on-the-bus also rapped the knuckles of the former altar boy who now takes his three kids to Mass. As Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice group Network, told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, it’s sad that a Catholic doesn’t understand that “we need to have each other’s backs. Only wealthy people can ever begin to pretend that they can live in a gated community all by themselves.”
Even Ryan’s former parish priest in Janesville weighed in. Father Stephen Umhoefer told the Center for Media and Democracy, “You can’t tell somebody that in 10 years your economic situation is going to be just wonderful because meanwhile your kids may starve to death.”
Beyond the even-keeled Ryan mien lurks full-tilt virulence. A moderate demeanor is not a sign of a moderate view of the world.
I need a cigarette.
beltane
Just today my 15 year-old son asked me “Who’s the sketchy looking guy running with Mitt Romney?”
Sketchy looking is right.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of compassion
Holeeee shit! Pass that cigarette, girl.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
I normally dismiss MoDo, but this is the 2nd column in as many weeks where I felt she had snapped out of the villager induced coma. The last one had to do with the Republican stance on abortion.
I won’t question her intentions. I’ll just appreciate this and take it at face value.
Spaghetti Lee
The plural of poof is pooves? I guess that does make sense…
Odie Hugh Manatee
What are Herman & Eddie Munster doing on Faux Nooz?
JGabriel
Sarah @ Top:
Paul Ryan was born the year MoDo went to the prom, or, at least, the year she turned 18.
.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@JGabriel:
Are you saying Maureen is old? What a bitch.
Joshua Norton
Looks exactly like Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney.
Except in this case, they’re both the dummy.
Spaghetti Lee
@JGabriel:
Ah, but we forget! A 59-42 split would be quite acceptable. What’s not acceptable is the idea of dating Paul Ryan, at any age.
JGabriel
@Sarah, Proud and Tall: About 60. Is that old? I’m not sure if that’s considered old anymore, or just late middle age.
.
JGabriel
@Spaghetti Lee:
True. But the night of MoDo’s prom Paul Ryan would have still been a suckling infant.
So I’m thinking it was a BJ after the 1999 White House Correspondents Dinner that Ryan “forgot” to call after.
.
ChrisNYC
Saw Ryan’s shoving off party from his hometown. He choked up again, again over his own stunning achievements, how awesome he is. He was in the gym and it made him misty to think of how he was just a tyke in that gym and now he’s so impressive. He finds himself very very inspiring.
hitchhiker
She’s singing my song.
I was 15 when I read Atlas Shrugged. The buzz lasted for just over a year.
The Dangerman
@Joshua Norton:
Only if Ryan were sitting in Romney’s lap (but, if he were sitting there and still had that shitty grin on his face, well…)
Richard
What’s missing from that picture are baseball caps and a pickup truck in the background to complete the phony “folksie” image.
Violet
MoDo, Soledad, Tweety…there are more, but I can’t think of them right now, who are calling out the Romney/Ryan ticket and the Republicans for being selfish, greedy, callous asshats. Maybe there’s something in the water.
Every time I see Paul Ryan and his sad clown face I want to throttle him.
Linda Featheringill
@hitchhiker:
I was 18 when I read Atlas Shrugged. I thought her protagonists had really crappy sex and no romance at all, no wonder, and no adventure. I didn’t want any of her world.
Frankensteinbeck
@Violet:
To know Mitt Romney is to hate him. Instead of papering over Romney’s foulness with his Villager Cred, Ryan is being suffused with Romney Stink.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@JGabriel: Sorry. I hit 60. It’s fuckin’ old. I just sit here and watch the physical bits packin’ it up. Watch out for the multiples of 20, they’re a bitch. 30, meh, not so bad. 40? ugh.
rammalamadingdong
MoDo is in form and she is going to shred him all the way to November. Except for the two columns that will call the President a wimp
BillinGlendaleCA
@Violet: Tweety got really pissed at Dubya Mitt Rombot3000(now with Windows ME), when Rombot made the comment “Any President would have done that, even Jimmy Carter” on the aniversary of OBL’s killing. Tweety used to work for Carter and has alot of respect for him. I think Tweety had to write the speech after the desert one disaster.
I’d also add Howard Fineman to that list after watching Tweety today.
Mr Stagger Lee
O/T I was reading about an interview with Tagg Romney about family dinners with the Mittster. I guess Daddy is first and God help you if you get in his way. One day one of the Mittster’s sons or the daughters in law, will come out with a tell all book called “Willard Dearest”. You think Johnny Depp would be a good version or maybe Christian Bale reprising his American Psycho role?
Yutsano
@rammalamadingdong: Well you know, fair and balanced and she hates Obama almost as much as Paulie Boy.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Linda Featheringill: “I was 18 when I read Atlas Shrugged. I thought her protagonists had really crappy sex and no romance at all, no wonder, and no adventure. I didn’t want any of her world.”
I was two or three years younger when I read Atlas Shrugged, but you have exactly captured what I came away with as well.
Maybe it’s a boy thing. I don’t know.
ETA: Sarah wrote one of the funniest things I have ever read on Ayn Rand. Something about a party she went to, and Ayn burying her arms up to her elbows in the shrimp cocktail. It was masterful, and had me howling on the floor. I nearly peed myself. The mental imagery was delicious.
shortstop
@Mr Stagger Lee: Dunno that a family member will break and risk that sweet, sweet inheritance, but I don’t think there’s much doubt a campaign staffer or two will pull a Steve Schmidt. This campaign is a national joke, and anyone associated with it who wants to work again will rush to get out the “If Mitt had only listened to me…” story, full of juicy details about the candidate’s repellent personality and bizarre quirks. Should make for fine reading.
RaflW
@hitchhiker:
I was 15 when I read half of Atlas Shrugged, then put it down and moved on to Catch-22, never to read another page of Ayn’s shite (except when part of a Paul Ryan take-down).
Now, my best friend of that era read the whole Shrug. And possibly other Randian delights. I think he may have been the one to recommend her.
He’s now a conservative with a crappy job, a divorce, a great kilt that he wears to the Renaissance Fair, and he won’t allow people to write on his Facebook wall.
Huh.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
aha
http://sarahproudandtall.com/2011/03/21/ayn-rand-david-brooks-and-a-bandicoot/
I laughed
I cried
(well actually, I laughed until I cried)
This is absolute comedy gold. Without reading this, you’re damned to a pathetic miserable existence. You are leading a life half-lived.
Sarah, Proud and Tall, thank you for this. IMO, your finest hour.
shortstop
@RaflW:
Hilarious.
srv
Kudos
Spaghetti Lee
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
It’s not this boy’s thing. I hated Rand from the second I was old enough to understand what she stood for. Scummy person, scummy books, and a scummy cult left in her wake. I want no part of it.
1badbaba3
Nothing wrong with being catty, as long as you’re doing it right. This is right on both counts.
@Spaghetti Lee: Forget it, she’s rolling.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Spaghetti Lee: I didn’t mean to be all inclusive. I was just speculating that having undescended testicles might be a necessary component to relating with it. =)
Yutsano
@RaflW: Have you been nipping with Sister Sarah? :)
1badbaba3
@Spaghetti Lee: “a scummy cult”
What a difference one letter makes.
Spaghetti Lee
@1badbaba3:
Oh, how bawdy!
RaflW
@shortstop:
Truth is funnier than fiction.
Which brings us to our man Bobo this evening. Any thoughts on his comedy stylings?
It may be worth one of your limited NYT views this month.
And no, Yutsano (but I’m flattered). I’ve been sober for 10+ years. Just the occasional fake beer (Becks NA) and that’s it.
Yutsano
@RaflW: That has to be fucking brilliant satire. No way BoBo writes anything that clever. Ever.
And congrats on the sobriety. It can be a very tough path to follow.
1badbaba3
@Spaghetti Lee: Well, I never said which letter.
eohippus
I managed to make it through a nerdy, book-filled childhood and adolescence without reading any Rand. It was just a lucky accident, as I read anything even remotely science fictional. Instead, I fell headlong into Stranger in a Strange Land at 14. I was obsessed and read the book multiple times. I wanted to be a water brother; I wanted to grok, you know? It’s a good thing I didn’t know about the Church of All Worlds or I might have fallen in with a really weird crowd. Fortunately, I grew out of it and escaped without too much of Heinlein’s patriotic libertarian baggage.
This level of susceptibility at fourteen makes me glad I didn’t encounter Rand at that impressionable age. It might have turned me into an Objectivist.
Anne Laurie
@Mr Stagger Lee:
John Malkovich. If Hollywood toupee technology can’t meet the challenge, then CGI can.
Uncle Glenny
I’m sorry, but I have to correct you. I believe the correct plural of “poof” is “poofs.” One says “poofters” not “pooveters.”
Maureen Dowd’s hair is so big because she failed the Breck challenge.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@RaflW: “It may be worth one of your limited NYT views this month.”
when you get blocked, go to the address box at the top of your browser window and just take the fiddly bits off the end of the link.
(meaning everything including and after the “?”)
presto. unlimited views.
(or for the geeks – remove the query string from the URL)
The NYT paywall is not exactly secure. I’d almost think that was intentional. Otherwise they’d at least use a cookie.
Mnemosyne
I never read any Rand, but the very first dating rule I came up with after a few bad experiences was “No Rush fans.”
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne: The group or “entertainer”?
The Other Chuck
@danah gaz (fka gaz): They do use a cookie. I’ve gotten the same results from removing the cookie. Didn’t realize it was also setting the cookie through the query string. I think the folks who wrote the NYT paywall are perhaps even dumber than the average PHP programmer.
hitchhiker
@Linda Featheringill:
Here’s the funny part . . . I was living in what’s still a conservative town in northern lower Michigan. My 10th grade history teacher mentioned one day that a friend of hers had read this incredible, mind-blowing book that had literally freaked her out so badly that she had a nervous breakdown.
I still remember the stunned expression on her face as she shared this with us, the impressionable, spotty youth entrusted to her care.
I COULD NOT WAIT to go get this book and have my mind blown. (Keep in mind that in small midwestern towns in 1967, it really seemed like we were missing all the fun. No drugs. Not even an fm radio station. 2 hours of pop music every afternoon after school on the one am station we could reliably get. I pored endlessly over Time Magazine images of San Francisco.)
So yeah. My very first attempt to ingest a mind-altering substance involved John effing Galt. lulz forever. Amen.
Yutsano
@The Other Chuck: NoScript mocks the NYT paywall.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@Uncle Glenny:
You are absolutely correct. However, I was going for the rather more Kenneth-Williamsian “poove”, for which the plural is almost certainly “pooves”.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@The Other Chuck: In my defense, I never checked. I charitably assumed they were just stupid. I didn’t assume they were stupid AND redundant.
My mistake. =)
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Yutsano: I’d use NoScript except that it I don’t like re-enabling scripts for 99% of the sites I visit, since it tends to badly degrade the experience.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Thankyou. You’re very sweet.
Yutsano
@danah gaz (fka gaz): I put up with it. I notice it solves more problems than it creates. And the makers are getting better at refining what gets blocked and what gets allowed.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@hitchhiker: You’re talking about Naked Lunch, right? =P
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@RaflW:
David Brooks is being funny and nasty. I’m very confused.
Calouste
So…, that picture at the top, I can’t see it very well on my phone, but those are Ryan and Romney impersonators on a satirical TV show, right? Right?
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Sarah, Proud and Tall: “You’re very sweet.”
sssh! I don’t want that to get out. I have a reputation to uphold!
=)
I’d say you’re welcome, but really, thank you. I was glad when you started writing @ BJ
Yutsano
@Sarah, Proud and Tall: I suspect hackery. There is just no way BoBo ever hurts his man tingles in such a shrill and uncivil fashion.
Hi dear. Today bit big wieners. And not in the positive fashion.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@Calouste:
It’s my favourite picture. I’m putting it on every one of my Romney/Ryan posts.
Ol' Nat
Yay! Beautiful piece!
WaterGirl
@ChrisNYC: Nice takedown.
Tehanu
@Joshua Norton:
Thank you!
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@Yutsano:
I’m sorry to hear that, dear.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Since this is SP&T’s thread…
Sad news everyone, Bigfoot is dead.
Killed by two teenage girls.
GG
@Sarah, Proud and Tall: Late As Usual, but thank you for this. Your commentary and the quotes you chose combined into the best thing I’ve read in a long time – and I’ve been reading Charles Pierce lately too.
I’m proud to say I managed to avoid the Rand book as an adolescent. I read the one with the orcs. All that book did was increase my love of languages and make me more appreciative of the natural world.
AA+ Bonds
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no it’s not
Quit crawling through your own blood to lick it from the boots of your oppressor. Quit it
Chuck Butcher
@RaflW:
If this is really BoBo something has come unhinged in my world. There is nothing recognizably BoBo in it. I’m not going to spend any time thinking about this considering the possible harm…
El Cid
Paul Ryan is a bold and daring number crunching wonk who aims to save us from all the spending which is killing our economy.
This is all true because the good people say this over and over and that makes it true. Sometimes I get all confused because I don’t understand things like how we have to cut back Social Security benefits for future recipients now because if we don’t then future recipients will get less than they would get based on current benefits, but then I hear the good people say again that he has crunched the numbers and I feel better again.
dance around in your bones
@RaflW:
Ok, who stole Bobo’s brain and replaced it with Andy Borowitz’s?
I refuse to believe Bobo wrote that….it’s actually funny.
Baldand50
@eohippus: Took a science fiction literature course in college (Thought it would be fluff…turned out I had to read a lot of books. Worked on it like a farm animal. Who knew?)
Read Stranger in a Strange Land. Some 35 years later, my only takeaways are the name of the martian (Jubal) and his discovered definition of humor (Misfortune that happens to someone else).
Really liked Canticle for Liebowitz, though.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@eohippus:
I read Stranger at 14, and The Fountainhead at 15. Never went on to read any more of Rand’s fiction– next up was Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, then LeGuin’a The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.
Then discovered Gene Wolfe, who in hindsight affected me a lot. Severian the Torturer is still among my favorite complex fictional characters. (I gave up trying to write any fiction years ago, when I realized that everything I tried to write was just a cheap, unskilled copy of Gene Wolfe).
What self-honesty I do have forces me to admit that I was, in many ways, cut of the same cloth as your typical teen Randian. Why did she infect them, and not me? I guess that I should be grateful that Heinlein got to me before Rand did.
I did end up reading more than a few of Rand’s “philosophy” texts in my 20s, but that was back in my days as one of the resident trolls on alt.philosophy.objectivism. Know Thine Enemy and all that.
Still sorry we didn’t do a better job of snuffing out those toxic memes before they metastasized throughout the culture.
We did try.
brantl
@AA+ Bonds: It is, when they absolutely deserve it.
Spike
And that makes today different from any other day how, exactly?
Fred Fnord
… Bob Dole needed C-Span …
Wait… is this really Maureen Dowd? How did she miss the uber-obvious put-down here (‘Bob Dole needed Viagra’, for those who weren’t around for the whole Bob Dole fiasco.)
humbert dinglepencker
The ZOG has no lips. I’ve never seen a picture of Ryan that shows that he has any lips. I would never trust a man who mouth was a mere slash across his face.