Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 02:26 am
More advice from failed Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan to his party, because if anyone knows how to beat Obama, it’s the ticket that just lost to him.
Paul Ryan gave a speech Saturday to the National Review Institute in Washington, in which he warned the Republicans to pick their fights with the President. He echoed Speaker Boehner’s paranoia that the President will try to “divide” Republicans.
But Ryan says GOP lawmakers “can’t get rattled” and shouldn’t “play the villain in his morality plays.”
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It’s a little late for that warning, isn’t it?
Catholic Paul Ryan might not be the best person to lecture the Republicans on how not to be the villain in anyone’s morality play, especially given that his budget was called immoral by the Nuns on the Bus.
It’s hard not to be the villain in a morality play when your policies are the villain to most Americans. If your party has been co-opted by corporate interests to such a degree that you preach austerity for the poor, sick and dying while defending corporate subsidies and corporate tax breaks, you are setting yourself up as the villain.
It’s telling that the new narrative of the Republican Party is that President Obama is so powerful, he can and will destroy them if they let him. This is coming from the party who was busted setting an agenda to destroy President Obama on the night of his first inauguration. So, it’s an admission of their own great fail, as well as a huge, bellowing whine about why they failed. Republicans believe Obama is so smart and so powerful that he divided them and got them to fall into his traps.
I’ll grant them that the President has learned how to use their obstruction to paint them as obstructionists, but who set that course? Republicans are whining about being failures and instead of admitting that they failed because it’s bad governance to hold destroying someone else as your sole objective (it’s also immoral and a waste of time — winners don’t do this), they are sniveling in the corner and pointing their fingers at Obama.
Republicans have become the Tonya Hardings of politics. They’ve been kneecapping the President’s agenda and assaulting his character for four years. They got busted and now they can’t stop crying about how it’s all so unfair because Nancy Kerrigan is a better skater but it was their turn, they were entitled, even if they had to break the rules to win. Naturally it’s Kerrigan’s/Obama’s fault that they are now personae non gratae.
Kudos to the Republican Party for noticing that their language has offended the majority of Americans. It has become obvious over the last few days that they are heeding the warnings to tone down the hate (e.g., it was jarring to hear a Republican on Bill Maher’s Real Time choose not to employ great vitriol and condescension when addressing the President’s Inaugural speech). But Republicans are still ignoring the very simple fact that their policies tell the truth. Instead, they are banking once again on the ignorance and short attention spans of Americans.
Only losers imbue their opposition with such great power that they blame them for their failures. Only losers run a race by trying to trip the opposition because they have so little faith in their own abilities. Republicans ought to take their own advice and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, take responsibility for their choice to be the detroyers of democracy, and let the market inform them that their policies can’t compete. Instead, Republicans have decided to gerrymander the fail — in other words, corrupt the free market by subsidizing their fail.
Propping up your failures with handouts in order to appease your ego is so Too Big to Fail. But Republicans are clearly not too big to fail, nor are they too grown up to spend the first four years of Obama’s presidency smugly insinuating that he’s not legitimate while letting their hatred of him turn them into poisonous creatures who would rather harm the country than work with the President.
It looks like the next four years are going to be filled with Paul Ryan following Sarah Palin’s example; Ryan is going to lead the Republican whinefest about how unfair it is that Obama beat them again. It’s not enough that Ryan employs Palin’s word salad as cover for the fact that he’s not the wonk they say he is. They’re going for the pity vote now. Vote Republican because they are victims of mean Obama. Protagonist Obama, the villain only in their bubble of a morality play, beat them again.
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