COLUMN: “PRESIDENT” PAUL RYAN AND HIS PATRON by John P. Flannery

Ryan getting ready to hold us up.



Mark Twain said that, while “history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme.”  The arrogance of politicians is the unalterable belief that the outcome will be different for them.

Four years ago, Senator John McCain, a ‘Nam hero because he was held prisoner at the “Hanoi Hilton” after crashing his plane was imprisoned again but this time, in 2008, it was by the far right wing of his own party. 

The party muzzled John’s celebrated rogue manner, especially his inconvenient campaign finance reforms, and forced him to choose a not-ready-for-prime-time running mate from Alaska, Governor Sarah Palin, who didn’t know what she didn’t know, not even the constitutional provision that defined her job as VP.  Palin couldn’t name any publication she read to keep informed, and her myopic view of foreign affairs, she bragged, was the sight line from her back porch through the Aleutians to the Russian shore.  Palin prompted an incurable national epidemic of confidence jitters at the slimmest possibility that she might ever have to succeed the senior McCain as President.

This year we have former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney promising us 12 million jobs that will appear, as if by magic, if we allow him to implement his “secret plan,” can you smell the snake oil, once he’s elected, oh yeah.  You can hear the barker at the carney, “step right up and give up your tax money to save the wealthiest from paying taxes, and your rich friends will deign to rain down upon you whatever excess monies they don’t need, even go so far as to hire you middle class folk – although you may have to move offshore to Bangalore to work.”  The words of a seeming angel cast a veil over the face of the devil.

Mitt announced his running mate, his doppelganger some say, another nationally unproven tyro from the far right, Congressman Paul Ryan, an Ayn Rand cultist devotee (who rankles at Rand’s atheism but loves her take-no-prisoner Darwinian capitalism).  Paul has passed only two bills of his own in Congress in thirteen years, but he’s been busy as a beaver more recently proposing a budget bill the bane of seniors nationwide who fear the loss of Medicare and Medicaid benefits.  This was hardly the book move for a presidential candidate, going around scaring the bejesus out of all those retirees in the nation and in Florida – a critical battleground state for the White House.  Mitt’s campaign drifted into a current running against him, so he had to “do something.” McCain thought the same thing in 2008.

I truly believe Romney recognized he’d lost the nomination as he wanted it, on his own terms, when he made the (Freudian) slip, announcing Ryan as the “next President of the United States.”

If Romney has a recognizable philosophy, it may not be what he needs to get the nomination. 

Romney is a lot like Senator Bob Dole who broke the indoor speed record for crossing the political spectrum, with a Guinness world record of inconsistent policy statements, just like Mitt, from the more neutral shades to far right red to land the nomination.  President Bill Clinton then pinned Dole down in the far right corner never letting the Dole of the rightward countenance to move toward the middle where the nation’s votes live in a general election.  It was a rout for Clinton that November. 

Now, I’m not saying that what Romney has done, in his R1-R2 strategy, will lead to a free fall failure as it did for Dole – I am prepared, however, to watch the bleeding begin.

GAZETTE COLUMN: CONGRESSMAN RYAN – NOT FIT TO TEACH! by John P. Flannery

RYAN AS ATLAS SHRUGGING

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), Chairman of the Budget Committee, apparently was never required to read the New Testament at whatever Roman Catholic Grammar School he attended.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote Congress on April 16, 2012, urging Congress to choose as a “central moral measure of any budget proposal” exactly “how it affects ‘the least of these,’” quoting the gospel of Matthew 25. 

The Conference of Bishops made it crystal clear, “the needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.”  The Catholic Bishops insisted, “every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.”  The Catholic Bishops protested, “for moral and human reasons,” the “unacceptable cuts to hunger and nutrition programs” because they “hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment.”

Ryan nevertheless insists his budget is consistent with Catholic teachings even though it amounts to $5 trillion in cuts.  Ryan told the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) without any remorse that the government was simply not responsible for lifting its citizens out of poverty.

The Catholic Bishops told Congress that they feared reducing the deficit in this dramatic manner would wipe out Pell grants, workforce training and development, nutrition assistance, low income tax credits and safe and affordable housing for the less fortunate.

Ryan didn’t answer the charge; instead, he attacked the legitimacy of the Catholic Bishops to criticize him, saying, “These are not all the Catholic bishops.”  The Catholic Bishops explained that they did speak for “all” as they were “elected by their fellow bishops to represent all of the U.S. bishops…”

Ryan might have learned something as a child from the Dominican nuns that taught us kids the Sermon on the Mount.  Sister Augustine, God rest her immortal soul, would have cracked her long thin wooden stick across the palms of Ryan’s chalky crooked hands for his trash talk, advocating indifference to the poor and suffering.

Ryan believes Catholic “teaching” is what you say it is and took that message recently, on April 26, 2012, to Gaston Hall at Georgetown University to “teach” the Jesuits and their student body what it means to be “Christian.”

88 Jesuits, faculty and staff welcomed Ryan in a short letter, “challeng[ing]” his “continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.”

They noted that Ryan claimed to be inspired by the late Ayn Rand.  Ryan reportedly said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”  Ryan reportedly instructed his Hill staffers to study Rand’s elitist philosophy with its felicific calculus favoring the wealthy, and declaiming the parasitic middle class and the poor.

The Jesuits and faculty wrote Ryan that his budget appeared to “reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  They explained that Rand’s “call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”

Unbowed, once at the University, Ryan invoked Pope Benedict XVI but blithely disregarded what Benedict wrote in his very first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”), that taught that three things made the Church the Holy Roman Catholic Church and one was caring for the poor, because “love of God and love of neighbor have become one: In the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself, and in Jesus we find God.”

Ryan, however, is as indifferent to the poor as his inspiration Rand was, and that puts him in opposition to the teachings of Jesus and Christ and Pope Benedict as well.  

CONGRESSMAN PAUL RYAN – SLASHING SICK SENIORS by John P. Flannery

Ryan's constituents boo him - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5kgnE1Xvec&feature=player_embedded

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) heads the House Budget Committee and he’s on a harsh legislative mission to cut and slash health care for sick seniors and push others out of nursing homes. 

By the way, if you consider yourself middle class, no matter what may be your upper income aspirations, he’s not your friend either.  

If you are among the hoity-toity wealthy, then this is your man, the servant of your every selfish desire.

The government spending you want cut, is the spending on you he’s prepared to cut. 

The income tax you want reduced, is the tax on the wealthy that concerns him, not your taxes.

Ryan has publicly explained the personal philosophy that led him to his unconstitutional budgetary dystopia.  He’s a self-admitted Ayn Rand cultist. 

Rand, a Russian émigré wrote a book titled, “The virtue of selfishness.”  She decried any “altruism” – any hint of selflessness, or sacrifice for anyone or any thing else.

According to Rand, in a 70-page rant by her hero, John Galt, in her 1,168-page “philosophical” tome, “Atlas Shrugged,” it is all about “the man at the top of the intellectual pyramid” and he “contributes the most to all those below him.” 

Galt declared, “the man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”  Thus, Galt’s oath: “I will never live for the sake of another man…”  So much for the golden rule.

In recent years, Rand’s newest recruits unsurprisingly arose out of the Tea Party movement – a “me movement,” funded by the Koch Brothers, and almost unparalleled for its selfish and elitist objectives. 

Ryan publicly praised the late Ms. Rand in D.C., stating, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” 

Ryan reportedly instructs his Hill staffers to study Rand’s elitist philosophy with its felicific calculus favoring the wealthy including the Koch Brothers, and declaiming the parasitic middle class.

It’s this core belief that became the bill he wrote that passed Congress last Friday.

Ryan’s bill kills Medicare dead 11 years hence, starting with slowly raising the age of eligibility, and then granting $8,000 vouchers to retirees to hand over to private insurance companies, no matter what the premiums cost, nor how they may increase over time, and without regard for how much health or prescription costs may go up.

Ryan’s bill cuts Medicaid $700 billion in the next decade.  No matter that Medicaid now pays for two-thirds of all nursing home residents.

Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, explained Ryan’s medicare proposal in this way, people “must take care of themselves as they grow older.”

Ryan proposes to cut the wealthiest individual tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, without reducing total tax revenue.  No money fairy is making up the difference.  They are going to have us, that “parasitic” middle class, pay the wealthy’s fair share.

Fortunately, Randian Ryan’s newly minted law has no legs in the U.S. Senate. 

But, if we’re not careful, we’ll yet awake to a Randian Ryan nightmare come true, a nation that no longer provides for our general welfare.

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