Esquire blogger Charles Pierce routinely refers to Paul Ryan as a “zombie-eyed granny starver” and did so again on Tuesday, but Pierce didn’t merely recycle one of his greatest hits for his Ryan-bashing post. He also likened the Wisconsin congressman to the most notorious con man in recent American history.
“Paul Ryan should not be trusted around the federal budget for the same reason that we would not trust Bernie Madoff with our checkbooks,” wrote Pierce. “The man is the single biggest fake in American public life…Any Democratic congresscritter who seeks to make a deal with him should be drummed out of Washington. Any reporter or pundit who takes his plans for the economy seriously should be reassigned to the custodial staff.”
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
[U]nder the leadership of Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin…the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, of which Ryan will be chairman of the House Ways And Means Committee, determined that, henceforth, a three-card monte technique called "dynamic scoring" would be employed by the CBO to judge the effect of what Ryan insists on calling "tax reform." Dynamic scoring is a scam. The ways you know it's a scam are twofold: 1) Paul Ryan is proposing it, and Paul Ryan should not be trusted around the federal budget for the same reason that we would not trust Bernie Madoff with our checkbooks, and 2) it purports to prove, almost always, something that history has taught us is not the case, and that common sense should have told us never made any sense; namely, that tax cuts actually raise revenues…
…[T]here's again a bustling in the hedgerow about Social Security, and the zombie-eyed granny starver is in the middle of this one, too…Ryan plans to use crippled people to scare old people into helping him impoverish them. I am, of course, paraphrasing, but not by much…
His plan to improve the trust fund's integrity is to hand it over to the Wall Street oligarchs who financed his political career after he graduated from college and got off the public dime…
…If [Ryan] ran [for president], he might have to explain in public and in some detail his new math that doesn't make sense, or the "tax loopholes" that he keeps talking about but resolutely keeps to himself, or his plans to destroy Social Security in order to "reform" it. The magic asterisks lose their magic when you have to explain the trick behind them, which is why Joe Biden laughed Ryan off the stage in their one debate. If Ryan were in any way honest, he'd lose 49 states. But, if he were in any way honest, he wouldn't be Paul Ryan, either. The man is the single biggest fake in American public life. He should have no more credibility on these issues than does Sarah Palin, his predecessor in the second spot on the national ticket. Any Democratic congresscritter who seeks to make a deal with him should be drummed out of Washington. Any reporter or pundit who takes his plans for the economy seriously should be reassigned to the custodial staff…
…He is perfectly positioned to demolish the entire idea of a social safety net, piecemeal, and to get government out of the lives of the people who need it most while making it more fully the servant of the people who will keep him in expensive wine…He's got his, Jack, and he's coming after yours.
