Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Tea Party Remedial Education: SUCKERS!

That's what Paul Krugman said of the radical GOP budget plan crafted by the extremist/objectivist (Ayn Rand cultist) Paul Ryan, who has taken over the House Budget Committee:
"[F]or all those older Americans who voted GOP last year because those nasty Democrats were going to cut Medicare, I have just one word," wrote New York Times columnist, and Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman: "suckers!"  
HERE COMES EDDIE (PAUL RYAN) MUNSTER!


Here's the bait-and-switch Ryan pulled on all of you IMBECILES frothing at the mouth because it was a black man who initiated the middle-of-the-road healthcare plan (proposed by Bob Dole and enacted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts) to ensure you keep your Medicare benefits, with modest reforms designed to keep this GREAT program strong for retirees well into the future. Instead of the so-called "Obamacare" you were brainwashed into fearing due to nonexistent "death panels" and the lies you would lose your Medicare ... well, now YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE IT FOR REAL, THANKS TO PAUL RYAN AND THE EXTREMIST REPUBLICANS YOU ELECTED.

But there's a catch. Ryan knows it and the older Teabaggers already on Medicare know it too, which is why they're such contemptuous, treasonous, selfish parasites:
Seniors, and others on Medicare, would be in a slightly different predicament. Currently seniors 65 and over are guaranteed a defined benefit program: taxpayers finance the system, and the government agrees to pay for seniors' health care services (though seniors have to pitch in too). Ryan's plan would leave that system intact for anybody currently on Medicare, or expecting to be on Medicare within 10 years. For everyone else the program would be radically overhauled.   
This isn't only just class warfare; it's generational class warfare. A totally new DOUBLE-DOWN concept. And it's being gleefully waged by the radical extremist Paul Ryan — no shit; this guy is way out there in the ideological extreme of right wing economics. Ryan's plan is what progressive Senator Bernie Sanders calls, "Robin Hood in reverse"— stealing from the poor and struggling middle class to give to the rich, beginning with a HUGE 10% cut from 35% to 25% in the top tax bracket,  financed by the rest of us.

The master plan is to demolish the New Deal, whose pillars are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, financial institutions regulation, and workers rights laws, including collective bargaining — in favor of a third world-style oligarchical dystopia with feudal lords and serfs, in which most of us, the serfs, fund and facilitate with our subsistence wage tax dollars, the playgrounds of the rich. Ironically, for the rabid, anti-Obama Teabaggers,  Ryan's plan, proposed with Alice Rivlin, former OMB Director under Clinton, "basically turns Medicare into ['Obamacare']":
It’s the same idea — regulated exchanges offering certified insurance products populated by subsidized buyers. If Ryan-Rivlin will unleash ferocious innovation that holds costs down, then so too should the Affordable Care Act. So at the end of our conversation, I asked Rivlin, who supported PPACA, if I was missing something. She laughed. “I keep talking to Paul and trying to convince him of that,” she said. “But even if he agreed with me, he couldn’t say so.”
Medicare is the biggest driver of the deficit. In essence, had all the Teabaggers carrying anti-Obama signs provided by the corporations and their little hand-written signs, "HANDS OFF MY MEDICARE," signed off on the Obama plan we'd all be in a much better place today. As if — as if Democrats, who proposed and passed Medicare for the health benefit of millions of seniors since 1965, while beating back successive attempts by Republicans to kill it, as if the Democrats would do anything to harm the program. But noooo. The pasty white, racist, ignorant Teabaggers dove straight into the GOP shark-infested waters at the mere sight or mention of our African American President. And they're still doing it, giving Donald Trump the solitary reason for his ridiculous candidacy.

So here we are. The only ones standing between your Medicare being totally demolished and turned into a for-profit privatized plan to benefit the corporations and Wall Street, are the Democrats and President Obama. You can't count on the President. Not only have you pissed him off — who wouldn't be with all the verbal garbage and threats hurled at him — but despite your delusions, he is nowhere near a "socialist"; he's more like a moderate-to-conservative Republican. He might save some of your Medicare; not much. Your best bet now lies with Nancy Pelosi and the minority liberal Democrats in the House, and with Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, who has a habit of being outflanked by Mitch McConnell.

Good luck with "Hands Off My Medicare" now that it's in the hands of Paul Ryan, elected by your ignorance and stupidity — along with the apathy and stupidity of Democratic voters, whose non-participation in the political process as a clear majority has contributed mightily to the nightmare we are living in at present. If you're not independently wealthy enough to substantially supplement the meager "voucher" Ryan wants to give you, you're TOAST; FINISHED. You might even DIE from your illnesses, if you can't afford your meds, doctor visits (they're free for preventive care under the despised 'Obamacare') or hospitalization. You're as good as DEAD much earlier than had you simply voted Democratic.

The Republicans call it "thinning out the herd."

Memo to Chris Matthews: There is a REASON some of your pundits of choice in the Beltway Media are known, collectively, as the Idiot Punditocracy. On Hardball you basically took the extremist Paul Ryan's position, in this exchange with Jeanne Cummings, Assistant Managing Editor of POLITICO:

MATTHEWS: Jeanne, just in strict analytical terms, watching these folks, I wonder if anybody who wants to get elected again in Congress is willing to put their hand up and say: “I want to cut the benefits going to people on Social Security. I want to cut the health benefits. You‘re not going to get dialysis for more than three months, X-many months. You‘re not going to get the artificial limb reworked after seven years. You‘re not going to get the following”?

CUMMINGS: in Washington, Chris, for the reasons that you make clear. It‘s politically very, very difficult. You have down in Florida Representative Allen West, who has actually talked—he‘s a Republican, a freshman—and he‘s talked more than many of them about some of the changes that would have to come to those programs. And the Democrats are immediately targeting him.  And that—those are the very issues they‘re using against him. 

Well, gollygeewhiz, let me think: Why in the world would Democrats be "immediately targeting" Allen West? Could it possibly be, Ms Jeanne, that West is the BIGGEST WHACKJOB in the House of Representatives? And to hold him up as a SERIOUS proponent of "entitlement reform"— just another euphemism for slashing and ultimately destroying Social Security and Medicare — is nothing short of incomprehensible for the "serious" journalist Ms Jeanne pretends to be. (When it comes to media outlets such as POLITICO and the Daily Caller, West's insane proposal to censor news agencies seems almost ... not so crazy.)

Shame on you, Jeanne, and the POLITICOs you rode in on. Want to know why we don't listen to what these idiots have to say, Chris? This is why. What are the odds we'll get sustained lovefest coverage of Paul Ryan from the Idiot Punditocracy? My odds: 1/9.

There is a very simple solution — favored in polling by solid majorities of the American people — to the Paul Ryan nightmare budget; one that Chris never mentioned: Raise revenues. make the rich pay their fair share. Roll back the tax rates for the top two or three percent to what they were during the Clinton presidency, and we'll be well on our way to solving our budget and deficit problems.

Here are the results of that CBS/Vanity Fair poll from January 2011 in graphical format (left) and by income level (right). Notice that Rep. Ryan caters exclusively to the "American people" constituting fewer than three percent of the population, which includes, of course, Chris and Jeanne:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The liberals are destroying America your relentless criticism of every traditional value and institution. Just like a person hipervritical of himself will self destruct so will any social group, that is what a country is. The US self belief has been destroyed. The economic crisis is the result. It really is a psicosocial pathology.

Carlos said...

If you're going to use big words you probably do not understand like the compound word "psychosocial", as well as "pathology" and "hypercritical", learn how to spell and use proper grammar. A formal, and continuing, education is the best remedy for ignorance.

Government is among our most traditional institutions. The absence of government is anarchy.