• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

You cannot shame the shameless.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Mobile Menu

  • Winnable House Races
  • Donate with Venmo, Zelle & PayPal
  • Site Feedback
  • War in Ukraine
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • Balloon Juice 2023 Pet Calendar (coming soon)
  • COVID-19 Coronavirus
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • War in Ukraine
  • Garden Chats
  • On The Road
  • 2021-22 Fundraising!
You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Politicans / Ryan Lyin' Weasel

Ryan Lyin' Weasel

More on the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver and His New Chief Enabler

by Anne Laurie|  August 12, 20123:34 pm| 106 Comments

This post is in: Election 2012, Ryan Lyin' Weasel, Romney of the Uncanny Valley


__
This graphic was the initial reaction from Erick ‘Infinite’ Erickson at Redstate:

If it is Ryan, I’ll be quite happy. His departure from Congress would improve both Congress and the Romney campaign. It would improve Congress because too many people tend to lionize him when his record has some flaws. His presence often drowns out competing ideas that may be better and/or more conservative.

So, just barely conservative enough for the RS Strike Farce, but still an improvement on that wild-eyed communist Romney. Good to have a scale, for comparison purposes…

Mr. Pierce, as always, nails it:

Leave it to Willard Romney, international man of principle, to get himself bullied into being bold and independent.

Make no mistake. In his decision to make Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, his running mate, Romney finally surrendered the tattered remnants of his soul not only to the extreme base of his party, but also to extremist economic policies, and to an extremist view of the country he seeks to lead. This is unimaginable to those of us who lived here under Romney’s barely perceptible stewardship of the Commonwealth (God save it!). If he’d even hinted that he agreed with a fraction of a smidgen of a portion of the policies on which Ryan has built his career, Romney would have been hanging from the Sacred Cod by the middle of 2005. And it’s hard not to notice that the way the decision got leaked — in the dead of a Friday night, with the Olympics still going on, after two weeks in which Romney and his campaign had demonstrated all the political skills of a handball — fairly dripped with flopsweat…

Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn’t believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he’s ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare…

show full post on front page

…[G]et him out of his comfort zone of being thought an intellectual by the likes of Louie Gohmert, and of being thought of as a bold thinker by half the buffet-grazers in the Beltway media, and he really is quite the political coward. (In this way, he is a perfect match for the man who picked him.) He does not have the raw balls to explain to the country that, no, he does not believe in government — not the federal government, anyway, and not as it was originally conceived, as the fundamental expression of a political commonwealth. He’s grandfathered his plan to chloroform Medicare so that, despite the deficit that he considers such an urgent problem, nobody alive today who might vote against him will be affected by it. For the same reason, he will not specify the cuts that he will make or the tax “loopholes” —coughMortgageInterestDeductioncough — that he will close. In any way that will come to matter to the people whose lives his policies will make harder and more miserable, Paul Ryan is still the high-school kid living off Social Security survivor benefits and reading Ayn Rand by flashlight under the sheets…

Doghouse Riley, “Rich Guy Picks Rich Guy Toady As Assistant“:

… And what a perfect summation of the last thirty years of “conservatism” this is: the über-rich white guy who thinks he should be President because he understands the needs of über-rich white guys, and the forty-something Randoid posterboy for mendacity. The CEO and the chief ad exec…

But, assuming there’s some reason other than under-the-table payoffs that made anyone feel good about the Republican party as of yesterday morning, how do you look at this stinkbomb and convince yourself that everything’s all right? A bottle of The Macallan 25 and your financial report? Your party is not in possession of Facts, an Argument, or its Senses. And that’s its sensible wing. You might win elections–you fucking might win this one, which should scare you, too–but you can’t govern. Thirty-two years ago, eight election cycles (which is enough for even “conservatives” to have begun coming to their senses), you got the opportunity to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of government. Today you’re just the fucking monkey wrench. Tax Cuts, Because I’d Really Rather Not Pay Taxes. You’ve gone from unsustainable to incomprehensible.

You’re the party of fucking lapel flags (as opposed to the Democrats, the party afraid to not wear lapel flags). You’re the party of facile gestures which in fact put the lie to your principles, and you don’t care because your principles are just there to distract people from your lying about them.

Okay, so full disclosure: I found you incomprehensible (and reprehensible) in 1980, but at least you didn’t double down every time you hit a roadblock. A lot of people said you lost your way with the collapse of the International Communist Conspiracy (though, of course, you had to’ve lost your way just to be found there). But I’d propose that in fact you’ve never recovered from Iran/Contra and the Great S&L Swindle; like Vietnam and Civil Rights, you patched it up with disinformation. And got away with it, to the extent that you won elections, but you lost your minds. And your souls, if any. Which brings us to Romney/Ryan, 2012. This Is What “Opportunity” Really Looks Like.™

More on the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver and His New Chief EnablerPost + Comments (106)

Saturday Evening Open Thread: Spectacular Flame-Outs

by Anne Laurie|  August 11, 20126:01 pm| 109 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Election 2012, Open Threads, Ryan Lyin' Weasel

It’s a gift that keeps on giving! Professor Krugman weighs in, from vacation, on Today’s Only Topic:

Galt / Gekko 2012

Paul Ryan for VP — or, as Romney said in the press conference, “the next president of the United States”. I did say Galt/Gekko, not Gekko/Galt…

[A]nyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mark Thoma reviews selected pieces I’ve written about Ryan; he is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine.

As I said, I have no idea how this will play politically. But it does look like a move from weakness, rather than strength; Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.

Via Paul Constant, Karl Frisch has a PDF of “All 290 Pages of American Bridges’ Opposition Research File on Paul Ryan.”

Constant also points out that Ryan is a much more professional liar than Romney:

… Something that worries me, though, is Ryan has a disconcerting habit of completely denying the reality of his record, in a very convincing way. If a senior citizen asks Ryan about privatizing Medicare, he will toss a word salad that leaves the senior disoriented and convinced that he’s actually for a stronger Medicare. He will force his interns to read Ayn Rand novels, tell everyone we’re “living in an Ayn Rand novel,” and even credit his entire life of public service to Ayn Rand, and then he will tell a crowded room with a straight face that his love for Ayn Rand is an “urban legend.” Both of these contradictory truths are on the record.

***********
Speaking of little wads of dust and ice showily flaming out, court astrologers would note that tonight is the annual peak of the Perseids:

The Perseid shower has it all. It offers a consistently high rate of meteors, it produces more bright, visible meteors than any other shower, it happens in August when many people are on vacation, and it happens at a time when nighttime temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are reasonable and the weather is good. What more could you ask for?

You could ask for the 2012 shower, because we have two added advantages. The moon will be in a waning crescent phase. That means on the night of the peak shower, the moon will be at about 25%, so it won’t block viewing. The second advantage is that the shower peaks on a Saturday night, so most people can afford to stay up late or sleep in on Sunday morning.

This year, the shower peaks on the night of August 11/12. You can expect to see somewhere around eighty “shooting stars” per hour between midnight and dawn. Add in the fact that just before dawn, Jupiter and Venus will join in and this promises to be one of the best Perseid showers in memory…

***********

What else is on the agenda for a summer Saturday night?

Saturday Evening Open Thread: Spectacular Flame-OutsPost + Comments (109)

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 13
  • Go to page 14
  • Go to page 15

Primary Sidebar

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal

2023 Pet Calendars

Pet Calendar Preview: A
Pet Calendar Preview: B

*Calendars can not be ordered until Cafe Press gets their calendar paper in.

Recent Comments

  • Jacel on Medium Cool – Who Almost Got the Part Instead? (Feb 6, 2023 @ 1:47am)
  • Steeplejack on Late Night Open Thread: Debating The Dubious Privilege of Being Obnoxious in Public (Feb 6, 2023 @ 1:47am)
  • Citizen Alan on Late Night Open Thread: Debating The Dubious Privilege of Being Obnoxious in Public (Feb 6, 2023 @ 1:45am)
  • Omnes Omnibus on Late Night Open Thread: Debating The Dubious Privilege of Being Obnoxious in Public (Feb 6, 2023 @ 1:41am)
  • West of the Rockies on Late Night Open Thread: Debating The Dubious Privilege of Being Obnoxious in Public (Feb 6, 2023 @ 1:41am)

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year
View by Past Author

Featuring

Medium Cool
Artists in Our Midst
Authors in Our Midst
We All Need A Little Kindness
Favorite Dogs & Cats
Classified Documents: A Primer

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Submit Photos to On the Road
Balloon Juice Mailing List Signup
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Links)
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Posts)

Front-pager Twitter

John Cole
DougJ (aka NYT Pitchbot)
Betty Cracker
Tom Levenson
TaMara
David Anderson
ActualCitizensUnited

Shop Amazon via this link to support Balloon Juice   

Join the Fight!

Join the Fight Signup Form
All Join the Fight Posts

Balloon Juice Events

5/14  The Apocalypse
5/20  Home Away from Home
5/29  We’re Back, Baby
7/21  Merging!

Balloon Juice for Ukraine

Donate

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2023 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc