Pot…meet kettle.
The Huffingtom Post
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) belittled progressives during a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday.
“Progressivism is well-intentioned but it is also — in my humble opinion — arrogant and condescending,” Ryan said, according to a transcript. “Instead of helping people make their own decisions, it makes those decisions for them. It makes Washington the center of power and politicians the center of attention.”
While Ryan had harsh words for progressives, he conceded their “vision proved compelling.”
“The Left keeps winning elections,” Ryan continued. “Why? Well, you can see the appeal. In uncertain times, people look for security. Progressives seem to have an answer … the progressive state offers a sense of security. But it’s a false sense of security because government can’t keep all its promises.”
Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, is the de-facto spokesperson for the GOP on fiscal austerity. In March, the House passed Ryan’s budget, which would balance the federal budget in 10 years by slashing spending on safety-net programs for the poor. The text of his budget cited a well-known study from Harvard economists on government debt that was recently repudiated by a group of scholars at the University of Massachusetts, who said the study had “serious errors.”
Despite the blow to Ryan’s austerity argument, he declared on Wednesday that “we have to stop spending money we don’t have.”
After defining conservative principles, Ryan said the Republican Party “must go” into “our inner cities, our barrios and our poor rural communities” and “demonstrate our full vision of freedom and community.”
“This vision is our response to progressivism,” he said.
Related articles
- Ryan blasts ‘arrogant and condescending’ progressive ideas (thehill.com)
- Does Progressivism Exist? (conservativeread.com)
- Paul Ryan: Conservative community (washingtonpost.com)
Deluded Republican Reformers
This past week, Lindsey Graham in essence demanded that cabinet nominee Chuck Hagel disprove rumors against him. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post, via Getty (FILE)
Daily Beast columnist, Michael Tomasky is spot on with the following article…
The Daily Beast
Conservative pundits’ ideas about fixing the GOP are totally meaningless, says Michael Tomasky, until they deal with the problem of their party’s rage-driven fanaticism.
Conservative pundits and intellectuals have spent the past week or two—ever since the publication in Commentary magazine of Peter Wehner and Michael Gerson’s“How to Save the Republican Party”—talking about, well, how to save the Republican Party. They have lots of ideas—some good, some not so good, most very sober-minded policy prescriptions. I wrote a short blog post about this on Thursday. But then I reflected: This topic needs a longer treatment. The party they purport to support and care about has been engaged in burning down the house of American politics for three or four years now, and they are saying nothing about it; and until they say something about it, everything else they say is close to meaningless.
As I’ve written many times, the conventional view of what’s wrong with the GOP gets at only a portion of the truth. When The New York Times or Politico does such a story, the story inevitably focuses on policy positions. Immigration. Same-sex marriage. Climate change. Tinker with these positions, several sages are quoted as saying, and the GOP will be back in the game.
God knows, policy positions are a problem. But they are not the problem. The problem is that the party is fanatical—a machine of rage, hate, and resentment. People are free to scoff and pretend it isn’t so, but I don’t think honest people can deny that we’ve never seen anything like this in the modern history of our country. There’s a symbiosis of malevolence between the extreme parts of the GOP base and Washington lawmakers, and it is destroying the Republican Party. That’s fine with me, although I am constantly mystified as to why it’s all right with the people I’m talking about. But it’s also destroying the country and our democratic institutions and processes, which is not fine with me.
Continue here…
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Filed under GOP Senate, Lindsey Graham
Tagged as Commentary (magazine), GOP, Michael Gerson, Michael Tomasky, New York Times, Republican, United States, Washington