There’s already been much meaty discussion of the ReThugs’ latest attempt to sell 99% of their fellow Americans down the river, but here’s a nice concise summary for defence against facebook postings & emails from low-information relatives. ‘The Collective’ at Esquire‘s Political Blog is shrill to “Paul Ryan and the New Politics of Sadism“:
… The thoroughgoing abandonment of the notion of a political commonwealth, cheered on by degrees since the elevation of Ronald Reagan and whatever ideas people could cram into his empty head, has reached the point among American conservatives where it is now the kind of faith you find in the most unshakable of perversions. It manifests itself everywhere…
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And the sadism is running now through the institutions of government. We have made our peace with torture to the extent that support for it now is as much a litmus test for being a Republican as opposition to abortion is. (The Democrats, of course, choose to deplore it without condemning it.) The Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the recent Thompson V. Connick decision — delivered, fittingly enough, by Justice Clarence Thomas, the walking Freudian petri dish who once opined that he saw nothing wrong with chaining inmates to a post in the hot sun — pretty much advises a man who was stuck on death row for fourteen years because of egregious prosecutorial misconduct to stop wasting the Supreme Court’s time and be grateful his sorry ass wasn’t fried a decade ago.
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And, in the Congress, there is Congressman Paul Ryan, who is angling right now to make a career out of political sadism…
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The object of his politics is to render political liberty subservient to economic exigencies, to render it an unaffordable luxury item available only to the wealthy, because only the wealthy are competent enough to exercise it.[…] Ryan has come to the unremarkable intellectual conclusion that more people would rather inflict pain — even vicariously, even through his greasy sadist’s smile — than receive it. He has seen that dynamic in action. Even the White House, occupied for the nonce by a putatively progressive Democrat, has signed on in a gentler way to the notion that “austerity” is the way out of our current economic morass, and “austerity” is fairly defined in this context as making other people hurt so you’ll feel better about yourself. Unemployed workers, whose pensions were looted by Wall Street sharpers, rage against the pensions of public workers, not because those pensions are so gloriously lavish, but because they exist at all. Somebody has something you don’t and they must pay for that. Small wonder that Paul Ryan thinks he can grin his way to the dystopic wasteland that he sees when he dreams of a free country. So much of the work already has been done for him over the previous three decades.
I did not remember hearing that Ryan was a Randroid. Read the whole thing, and gird your loins to fight on.
Late Night Open Thread: “He Dreams of Your Pain”Post + Comments (78)