If this is Wednesday it must be time for another attempt by Bill Kristol and his merry men to pretend that Paul Ryan is going to run for president.
Paul Ryan isn’t going to run for president. Why does Bill Kristol want to pretend that he is?
Because Paul Ryan is the author of a totally fake “plan” for balancing the budget that involves cutting Medicare by simply forcing Americans to pay for it themselves. Two months ago, every Republican alive had to swear fealty to “the Ryan plan.” Now they’ve forgotten that it exists. Bill desperately wants to put it back on the table.
Why does Bill want to do that, when, as any Republican could tell him, that pack of lazy, welfare-loving slobs known as the American electorate will never buy it? Because Bill is afraid that the Tea Party, with their explicit determination never to raise taxes, and their implicit determination never to cut Social Security and Medicare, and their phony determination to balance the budget (I hope you’re not running out of fingers here)—if they actually get in office, well, they’ll have to cut something, and that something is likely to be defence. They’re likely to decide that, yes, the U.S. is an exceptional nation, is the exceptional nation, and the exceptional thing to do is just to sit here in our own hemisphere and not give a damn about anyone. Not even Israel.
And so that’s why Bill Kristol wants to talk about Paul Ryan running for president. Even though he won’t. And Bill knows it.
Afterwords
Glenn Greenwald has a long, rambling rant here about the endless exercises in psephology* that clog the media these days. Yes, Glenn, it is the moral and intellectual, not to say aesthetic, equivalent of arguing about the outcome of the 2014 Super Bowl. Because who wants to focus on reality? A stagnant economy with no hope of recovery, coupled with a bloody, incompetent foreign policy that seems to have no purpose other than to bankrupt us both morally and financially? Is that what you want to write about?
*Literally, the science of pebbles. Because the Greeks—that is to say, the Athenians—used to vote with them. A “psephism” was a decree of the Athenian assembly.
