The Paul Ryan Gambit

*Written by Rob Rimes.

Thank Jesus I’ve got some Blanton’s Straight From the Barrel 140 proof bourbon whiskey to spritz my tonsils with, as this article may become a fucking barnburner. For the unenlightened who need shit spelled out for them, this is an official disclaimer. Easily offended bitches hit the back button now!

So Mitt Romney has shocked the world and named his running mate much earlier than expected! If you’ve been living under a goddamned rock and haven’t heard the news yet, Governor Romney has selected Paul Ryan – the dashing congressman from Wisconsin that  developed the Ryan Plan and tried to use it to smash Obama’s economic idiocy with even more economic idiocy. Take it easy Ryanists! I’ll explain why your hero’s economic policy is idiotic, so just hold your tiny stones for a second!

So okay, maybe “shocked” isn’t the right word as I find this to not be a big surprise by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, six months ago I made a bet with a friend that Paul Ryan would be Romney’s Biden-smasher and when I really look at all the other recently rumored names, there wasn’t anyone else that would have been a more perfect choice for Ol’ Mittens. Now don’t get it twisted, that is not a compliment. To elaborate, let’s look at the similarities between the two men going beyond the fact that they both have fantastic manes and the same tailor.

They basically subscribe to the same foreign policy, which means that they both are okay with military expansion and shitting on other countries economically through manipulating the free market while still calling it a “free market”. They both have the same economic policy more or less and Romney has praised and basically adopted the Ryan Plan as his own – even before he announced that homeboy was his pick for VP. Romney and Ryan both pimped out and supported economic stimulus and the bailouts. They promote the same big government pro-drug war policies as Obama, Bush and every other big headed know-it-all pro-prohibition prison state politician before them. Both men love the police state and are big supporters of the PATRIOT Act, as well as other tyrannous legislation. Hell, Ryan has backed NDAA, SOPA, PIPA, CISPA and pretty much everything else that Big Brother has pushed down the pipeline recently. Romney claims he is opposed to some of these but only after these laws were booed when mentioned during debates. Do you think Romney would actually fight to overturn NDAA or any of the other police state legislation we are now stuck with? The answer is “fuck no”. Shit, we’ll be lucky if he actually uses his executive power on ObamaCare, as promised, but we should all know better. But hey, if Ol’ Mittens proves me wrong and lives up to that promise, I’ll buy him a rib dinner and an old fashioned. Keep in mind though, he said he’d do it on his first day in office. Fuck it, I’ll give him a week because I’m a hell of a guy!

So with these similarities, it is easy to see that Mitt, via his choice, is just placating to the establishment neocon shitbirds. I mean c’mon, they call Ryan “extreme”! If he’s extreme than Rand Paul must be a supernova buttfucking a quasar on a Sea-Doo! The only reason those establishment puppet-fuckers call Ryan “extreme” is because they have to paint the illusion that he is some sort of vast contrast to Romney so that it looks as if the Romney Camp covers all Republican bases. Well, the liberals call him extreme too but that’s because they call everyone extreme. It reminds me of the 90′s when the word “extreme” was used to describe every new product or non-traditional sport. Cue the generic obnoxious TV spokesperson: “BOOM! This new fucking lemon chiffon yogurt is so fucking extreme it’ll blow your fucking cock off and make it do an ollie over a fucking battleship! BOOM! Now that’s fucking EXTREME!!!”

Now what really makes him extreme? What is radical about Ryan? Well, to put it simply, he brought forth the Ryan Plan and in it he had major budget cuts and Medicare reform. Now while the plan itself is pretty much a big pile of shit (I’ll explain later) it is a symbolic gesture in that it looks completely different than something that would come out of the Republican establishment norm. What’s radical about it is that it attempts to cut spending and put us on a fiscally responsible path that is not consistent with the establishment agenda. With the Tea Party very vocally exposing that establishment agenda, the guy who looks like he is combating it, is perceived the hero. Unfortunately, the real heroes like Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Rand Paul and Justin Amash are deemed too extreme – even though they offer real solutions that could turn America around. You see, they aren’t just talk and Ryan might not be just talk as well but his plan is fucking mediocre at best. I’m sorry but balancing the budget by 2045 is insanely fucking laughable; especially when it can be done within just a few years. It doesn’t matter though. The GOP establishment knows that the large grassroots beast that is supporting them wants budget cuts and fiscal sanity. Therefore they had to deliver and this is pretty much the happy medium for everyone, at least from their bird’s eye point-of-view.

Now Paul Ryan may look young and seems to be a fresh whippersnapper in the unfairly described “party for old white men” but don’t be fooled. Ryan has already had seven terms in Congress. No that is not a typo, he has really had seven (7) terms! At only forty-two years of age, it’s like he’s been in power since he was fucking twelve! What’s better than exploiting a career politician that most perceive as a Washington rookie regardless of all the press his Ryan Plan has gotten over the last few years? I sincerely doubt that most people even realize just how long this guy has been poorly engineering our daily lives. Now while Paul Ryan may have the occasional good idea, let’s give credit where it’s due, he is no Rand Paul or Justin Amash in the fact that he won’t actually shake things up for the establishment on a real tangible level. However, they are certainly implying that he is a noble shit-stirrer out to keep the GOP masters in check. That’s what the Republican elite know that they need (at least through public perception) because they’ve been bitchslapped so hard by the grassroots movements within their own party and those just on the cusp of the GOP’s grasp. Unfortunately for us, Ryan isn’t really the true hero we need right now to smooth out the Romney Camp.

So now that you know how long this guy has been around, you might be wondering what are some of his other blunders besides those mentioned already? Well, he was basically loyal to George W. Bush and voted for his monstrous and moronic No Child Left Behind bill. Also being loyal to Bush, yet odd considering his hatred for ObamaCare, Ryan supported Bush’s big prescription drug entitlement that added over $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities to the national debt! Yeah, that was fiscally fucking responsible! He supported the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and ultimately the Transportation Security Administration who gleefully tugs our balls and squeezes our tits by the millions everyday.

Even though Ryan has blasted the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke over the years, his rhetoric doesn’t necessarily match up with his actions. I mean, the fact that he himself pimped out TARP like it was the best piece of ass in Milwaukee is a pretty big goddamned indicator that if one were to label him “full of shit” they wouldn’t actually be wrong. Luckily for us truth-seekers, WikiLeaks just recently dumped more cables – some of which uncover Paul Ryan’s monetary policy actions. One worth noting is that Ryan has been vocally opposed to the Fed’s attempts at deflation. In fact, in 2010 he stated in an interview in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel while discussing Bernanke and the Federal Reserve, “Name me a nation in history that has prospered by devaluing its currency?” However, according to WikiLeaks, in 2008 during a meeting with then Argentine Cabinet Chief Minister Sergio Massa:

Rep. Ryan noted that among the many tools being deployed to address the crisis, careful attention was being paid to monetary policy, which previously had sought to contain inflation but now needed to target potential deflation. He called “historic” the Federal Reserve’s decision the previous day to lower interest rates to near zero. Ultimately, the important thing was to fix the financial system by requiring greater transparency and to keep speculation from spinning out of control … Rep. Ryan recalled that Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke was one of the most prominent scholars of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and that two lessons he had drawn from Bernanke’s academic work were the negative consequences in this type of crisis of taking liquidity out of the system and of enacting protectionist measures.

In response to this revelation, Salon‘s Sam Knight wrote:

With the cameras off, Ryan expressed confidence in the Fed’s fight against deflation, and he recognized “the negative consequences … of taking liquidity out of the system” in times of a sharp downturn. ..In other words, the Congressman might be more Von Bismark than Von Mises.

So being about 1,600 words into this bitch, I should now probably get into the Ryan Plan (which is now the Romney Plan) and why it’s a pile of shit. First of all, this plan wouldn’t really balance the budget for another 30-35 years. Rand Paul had a plan that would balance the budget in just 5 years! Of course, his plan was considered “too extreme”.. ooh there’s that word again. The truth is that the Ryan Plan doesn’t take our economic woes seriously enough to effectively change them in a way that wouldn’t take decades. Hell, getting back to my point about foreign policy, Paul Ryan’s plan actually increases military spending! The guy is trying to spend us out of debt, which is a tactic he has been very critical of in regards to the actions of the progressive leftists and neocon righties. Then again, this is a guy who voted for the Iraq War in 2002 and also voted against winding down the unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan back in 2007 and 2011. We’ve already spent $1.3 trillion on the War on Terror and that is just what’s transparent. Never mind that we have over 900 military bases in over 130 countries and that we have been involved in other wars and campaigns like Libya and now possibly Syria and Iran.

Moving beyond the military aspect but still looking at the Ryan Plan, it states that under the plan we would spend $3.6 trillion this year while raking in $2.4 trillion (taxes); obviously that is still a massive deficit. Obama’s budget calls for $3.8 trillion in spending and $2.5 trillion to be brought in. Technically, the Ryan Plan isn’t as bad as Obama’s budget but it is still in the same ballpark and really paints a picture that these fiscal conservatives and their champion Mr. Ryan aren’t really that far from the evil spend-crazy progressive Democrats they vehemently loathe and can’t compromise with. To be fair, there is more of a shift as time goes on. In 2013, Ryan’s plan would spend $3.5 trillion and it would spend $4.9 trillion in 2022 compared to Obama’s budget that would amount to $3.8 trillion in 2013 and swell to $5.8 trillion in 2022. Regardless of the shift, these are still some pretty scary numbers on both sides of the coin!

I think Nick Gillespie of Reason did a good job of summing up this scenario in an article he wrote earlier this year:

Here we are, years into a governmental deficit situation that shows no sign of ending. How is it that Ryan and the Republican leadership cannot even dream of balancing a budget over 10 years’ time? All of the discussion of reforming entitlements and the tax code and everything else is really great and necessary – I mean that sincerely – but when you cannot envision a way of reducing government spending after a decade-plus of an unrestrained spending binge, then you are not serious about cutting government. If Milton Friedman was right that spending is the proper measure of the government’s size and scope in everybody’s life, then the establishment GOP is signaling what we knew all along: They are simply an echo of the Democratic Party.

Gillespie really hits the nail on the head there.

Now I don’t think that Paul Ryan is a bad guy and I do think that he means well – in general. I just know that he is not the guy that the GOP faithful believe him to be. He certainly doesn’t reflect my personal political beliefs and he is closer to being an enemy of my philosophy than an ally. Sure, his rhetoric is nice but his actions haven’t truly mirrored his words throughout the years and anyone who has voted for as many big government solutions to our problems as he has, is a wraith of the state. If Capitol Hill was the Eye of Sauron then Paul Ryan would most assuredly be one of the black robed Nazgûl, as he is a loyal servant and weapon of the tyrants who try to bind us.