oped: No Paul you are the problem...along with all your Congressional Frat boys...on both sides of the aisle.
After this little diatribe of yours we have come to the conclusion that Y'all tell us what you think we want to hear during the election cycles...then after the election y'all go back to the same ol' same ol' CYA and pad your bank accounts and portfolios with kick back deals. Yes We the People are onto all of you...yes it is your prerogative and free will to suck on Obama's teets and fatten your bank accounts on the backs of Middle America, however it is our prerogative to remove you from office the next election cycle akin to your butt buddy John *Boner* Boehner . Be advised your next election cycle will see money flow into your district to the Tea Party challenger to your election! Y'all just don't get it...We the People have had enough of the lies,corruption and destruction of the US Constitution/Bill of Rights!
Pack your proverbial bags dude you are going to be history!
By Paul Waldman
Today, Paul Ryan gave a
fascinating speech
at Heritage Action, a tea party-allied organization that has fashioned
itself as the guardian of conservative purity. The speech called for
unity. “To quote William Wallace in Braveheart,” he said, “we have to
unite the clans.”
But his speech was actually a repudiation of
everything the tea party has done. Not only that, Ryan also took shots
at the congressional Republican leadership, and even the current GOP
presidential candidates. He didn’t call anyone out by name, but if you
understand what’s happening now and the conflict that has roiled the
Republican Party for the last seven years, the critique was hard to
miss.
Not surprisingly, for much of the speech he blamed conservatives’ own
sins on progressives, Democrats, and Barack Obama. That has become a
familiar refrain — It’s their fault that we’ve become such monsters! —
but when you say that, you’re still acknowledging that the sins exist.
Let’s start here:
“My theory of the
case is this: We win when we have an ideas contest. We lose when we have
a personality contest. We can’t fall into the progressives’ trap of
acting like angry reactionaries. The Left would love nothing more than
for a fragmented conservative movement to stand in a circular firing
squad, so the progressives can win by default.
“This president is struggling to remain relevant in an election year
when he’s not on the ballot. He is going to do all he can to elect
another progressive by distracting the American people. So he’s going to
try to get us talking about guns or some other hot-button issue and not
about his failures on ISIS or the economy or national security. He’s
going to try to knock us off our game. We have to understand his
distractions for what they are. Otherwise, we’re going to have a
distraction this week, next week, and the week after that. And that’s
going to be the Obama playbook all year long.”
Yes, the party of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, of Donald Trump and
Ted Cruz, cares not for “personality.” And look, nobody “trapped”
Republicans into “acting like angry reactionaries.” They did that all on
their own. But it’s interesting that Ryan cites guns as a distracting
hot-button issue that is important only because Barack Obama is forcing
conservatives to talk about it against their will. Last time I checked,
lots of Republicans thought the gun issue is absolutely vital to
maintaining liberty. The same is true of any other hot-button issue you
could name, whether it’s abortion or same-sex marriage or something
else: the issue might or might not be advantageous to Democrats, but
it’s also very important to at least a significant chunk of the
Republican electorate. It’s hard to tell where Ryan draws the line
between real issues and distractions, but every time you define an issue
as the latter, you’re telling some major Republican constituency to
shut its mouth.
This is perhaps the most critical part of Ryan’s speech:
“And
so what I want to say to you today is this: Don’t take the bait. Don’t
fight over tactics. And don’t impugn people’s motives. It’s fine if you
disagree. And there’s a lot that’s rotten in Washington. There’s no
doubt about that. But we can’t let how you vote on an amendment to an
appropriations bill define what it means to be a conservative. Because,
it’s setting our sights too low. Frankly, that’s letting the president
define us. That’s what he wants us to do. That’s defining ourselves as
an opposition party, instead of a proposition party.
“So we have to be straight with each other, and more importantly, we
have to be straight with the American people. We can’t promise that we
can repeal Obamacare when a guy with the last name Obama is president.
All that does is set us up for failure . . . and disappointment . . .
and recriminations.
“When voices in the conservative movement
demand things that they know we can’t achieve with a Democrat in the
White House, all that does is depress our base and in turn help
Democrats stay in the White House. We can’t do that anymore.”
Again, the idea that President Obama somehow baited Republicans into
fighting amongst themselves for the last seven years is laughable, but
look at all the things Ryan is criticizing here. First: “Don’t fight
over tactics.” That’s just about all Republicans have been fighting
about for years. The substantive differences within the party are often
minor, and what tends to differentiate a tea partier from an
accommodationist squish is just that, tactics. The tea partier and the
squish both want to repeal Obamacare; the only difference between them
is that the tea partier thinks shutting down the government is an
appropriate tactic to make it happen. They both want to reduce the size
of government, but the tea partier thinks forcing the United States of
America to default on its debts is a good tactic to bring that about.
They both want to defund Planned Parenthood; the only difference is
whether they think it’s a fight worth having right now.
Ryan also says: “we can’t let how you vote on an amendment to an
appropriations bill define what it means to be a conservative.” This,
too, is a direct shot at the tea party. The argument they’ve made over
and over is that things like how you vote on an amendment do indeed
define what it means to be a conservative. Since ideological differences
within the party have been reduced almost to nothing, those kinds of
decisions are what supposedly separate the believers from the apostates.
Did you vote against Obamacare 50 times, or only 49 times? Did you
knuckle under and vote to keep the government open? Have you opposed
“amnesty” 100 percent of the time, or only for the last few years? These
are the distinctions that have defined the tea party’s conception of
conservatism.
And perhaps most shockingly, Ryan says: “We can’t promise that we can
repeal Obamacare when a guy with the last name Obama is president…When
voices in the conservative movement demand things that they know we
can’t achieve with a Democrat in the White House, all that does is
depress our base and in turn help Democrats stay in the White House.”
This is the very heart of the battle that has consumed the party and fed
the rebellion playing out in the presidential race. Republican base
voters are fed up with a congressional leadership that told them that if
those voters helped take back the House and then the Senate, that
they’d stop Barack Obama in his tracks — but then failed to deliver.
Ryan is correctly arguing that it was stupid to make promises that
couldn’t possibly be kept, but he’s arguing that it was making the promise that was the problem, while tea partiers and the base still believe it was the not keeping
the promise that was the far greater sin. They see Mitch McConnell and
Ryan’s predecessor John Boehner as feckless and weak, lacking the
courage to stand up to Barack Obama. In their view, McConnell and
Boehner are contemptible not because they lied to them about what could
be achieved but because they didn’t achieve the impossible
Near the end of the speech, Ryan gives an implicit critique of his party’s presidential candidates:
“So
we need to be inspirational. We need to be inclusive. We need to show
how our principles and policies are universal and how they apply to
everybody. We know that the economy is weak. We know that the world is
on fire. We know that the future is uncertain. There’s a lot of
frustration and anger out there. And is it justified? It sure is.
“But we should not follow the Democrats and play identity politics.
Let’s talk to people in ways that unite us and that are unique to
America’s founding. That’s what I think people are hungry for.”
In case you didn’t notice, the GOP presidential candidates are also
playing identity politics right now. The frontrunner for the Republican
nomination has proposed banning Muslims from the United States and
building a wall across our southern border, called Mexican immigrants
rapists and drug dealers, and questioned one of his opponents’ standing
as an American. Another candidate
said that no Muslim should be elected president. The Republican establishment’s golden boy could barely
open his mouth
in the last couple of weeks without invoking Jesus (though maybe now
that Iowa is behind him, that’ll change). Identity politics has been
central to Republican campaigns for the White House for the last
half-century, though I guess if it’s
white identity politics then it doesn’t count.
In any case, if you had to come up with two words to describe the
current GOP presidential campaign, “inspirational” and “inclusive” would
be pretty far down the list. And if Republican primary voters are
hungry for national unity, they’ve done a good job of keeping it a
secret.
So in this speech, Ryan has essentially repudiated the
entire last seven years of Republican politics, up to and including
what’s happening right now. Which is nice to hear. But if you think
it’ll change the minds of those who have been engaged in these fights,
I’ve got an Obamacare repeal to sell you.