Paul Ryan (r): ….If these cuts go through, our Navy will be the smallest, the smallest it has been since before World War I….

Michael Bersin ‏@MBersin

Oh, God. The Navy of WW 1. More coastal defense monitors and dreadnaughts, please. #FactsMatter 8:59 PM – 11 Oct 12

What is it with right wingnut republicans and dreadnaughts? Just asking.

Previously:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): comparing apples to navel oranges (February 16, 2012)

U.S.Navy Active Ship Force Levels, 1917-1923

11/11/18

Battleship 39

Monitors, Coastal 7

Cruisers 31

Destroyers 110

Frigates 17

Submarines 80

Mine Warfare 53

Patrol 350

Auxiliary 87

Surface Warships 204

Total Active 774

The last Coast Defense Monitor went out of commission in 1921.

[emphasis added]

U.S.Navy Active Ship Force Levels, 2007 to 2011

9/30/11

Carriers 11  

Cruisers 22

Destroyers 61

Frigates 26  

LCS * 2

Submarines 53

SSBN 14

SSGN 4  

Mine Warfare 14  

Amphibious 31  

Auxiliary 47  

Surface Warships 122    

Total Active 285  

* Littoral Combat Ship

[emphasis added]

Because modern defense systems have fewer capabilities than those of almost a century ago.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): still obsessed with those navel oranges (July 24, 2012)

When I was about thirteen years old, I used to faithfully watch the TV series Leave it to Beaver. The series centered on a family, the Cleavers, who, according to Wikipedia, exemplified “the idealized suburban family of the mid-20th century.” I, however, watched because I thought Beaver’s big brother, Wally, was the cutest boy ever. My crush didn’t last too long, but I can still remember all the characters on the show. Which is why I had a real aha moment when Jonathan Bernstein noted the resemblance between a character on the show, Eddie Haskell, and GOP Veep candidate Paul Ryan. After some thought, it occurred to me that both Eddie and his sidekick on the show, Lumpy Rutherford, foils to the too-good-to-be true Cleaver boys, have a lot in common with many members of today’s Republican Party.

For those of you who are too young to have watched Leave it to Beaver, which aired between 1957 and 1963, this description of Eddie captures the critical points:

Eddie’s two trademarks are his unctuous politeness to adults and his weasly, sharp-tongued meanness to everybody else. He is a model white-collar delinquent, a creep who goads people into trouble rather than perpetrating the crime himself. He was a born shirker, not worker, and a strain on any parent, especially his own long-suffering mother and father, Agnes and George. […] but really, when it comes to Eddie, when you’ve said “creep,” you’ve said it all.

Just think of Ryan trotting his 78 year old Mother out before the old folks in Florida, talking up the need to keep Medicare safe from Obama, with nary a word about his plan to destroy the program in all but name. Or think about all his smarmy lies during the Republican convention. Pure Eddie. Missouri’s Roy Blunt also has his Eddie Haskell moments, kissing up to rich, corporate types, sidestepping the hard questions with GOP talking points and pious bromides, delivering a swift kick in the behind to those who have nothing he wants, while pretending, after years as a Washington socialite, that he’s still a down-home boy. Romney, himself, the etch-a-sketch king of mendacity, surely qualifies as the archetypal Eddie.

Clarence “Lumpy” Rutherford, the second Leave it to Beaver character that comes to mind, is an equally common type in the GOP. Lumpy has been described as follows:

… he is the first bully that the Cleaver boys must deal with. Pretty soon his true cowardly, lumbering self shows through, and they see him for a kind of harmless buffoon. As he continues to “swell up,” everybody gets a good laugh at Lumpy’s expense, but as long as he’s getting his three squares and a few snacks in-between and his father is not yelling at him to much, he’s a happy enough boob, sporting a silly sort of dodo’s grin. When things are going poorly, which is most of the time, he still whines for his “Daddy.

Although Lumpy happily carried out Eddie Haskell’s mean-minded schemes without a thought, he never really understood the goals of the underlying plan. He just wanted to hang with the guys and be accepted.

We’ve got lots of Lumpys here in Missouri. If Ed Martin were fictional, I’d have suspected that the author based his character on Lumpy. Jim Lembke? Maybe. Brian Nieves is perhaps a tad too angry, potentially violent and unstable, but otherwise he fits the criteria – although on second thought, he’s actually more like a Lumpy who thinks he’s an Eddie.

On the national scene, I’d suggest politicians like Joe Walsh, who thinks the way to answer Sandra Fluke’s critique of the GOP is to tell her to get a job, and Steve King. They’re both mean, not too bright, and more than willing to do the dirty work that comes their way. King actually tried to come to Todd Akin’s rescue until he figured out that the big guys weren’t heading in that direction and it was wiser to back off. Romney recently endorsed his re-election effort, declaring that “I want him as my partner in Washington!” Eddie and Lumpy, together again.

There are, of course, folks in the Republican Party who aren’t conniving or bullies, people more like the Cleaver boy’s parents. They’re conventional, kind, if a bit smug, not at all evil, but just somewhat blinkered when it comes to reality. For example, just like Wally and the Beaver’s dad who was always kind to the hapless Lumpy, elder GOP statesman John Danforth endorsed Ed Martin. While these folks seem to find the Eddie Haskells and Lumpy Rutherfords in their party distasteful, they are also mostly unwilling to risk the wrath of these new GOPers who have usurped the more genteel Republican party of yesteryear.      

After releasing what TPM characterized as a “tepid” response to the Akin “legitimate rape” statement yesterday, Romney seems to have finally decided which way the wind is blowing, and today issued a far more forceful statement:

“Rep. Akin comments on rape are insulting, inexcusable, and, frankly, wrong,” Romney told National Review. “Like millions of other Americans, we found them to be offensive.”

Many commentators have noted, however, that the substance of Akin’s comments about the exception for rape have been endorsed by both Romney and his VP choice, Paul Ryan. In fact, Paul Ryan, was fairly full-throated in his support of legislation that would have limited federal funding for abortions to cases of “forcible” rape, another way to talk about “legitimate” rape. The seeming contradiction is raising questions among the faithful, as indicated in this tweet:

Kyle Luebke ‏@kylejl89

@streitfeldcnn I wonder why #Ryan supports banning it in cases of rape then. Is #RomneyRyan trying to hide their true position?

Ed Kilgore captures the fine points of the GOP dilemma that has been forced to the forefront by Akin’s bumbling:

The enduring significance of Akin’s “gaffe” (which meets the Kinsley Gaffe definition of an utterance that reveals the pol’s true feelings) may be to force anti-choicers in one direction or the other: towards the morally repugnant view that rape and incest victims need to be forced to carry pregnancies to term, and the morally inconsistent position that a zygote’s status and rights depend on the circumstances of its conception. Defining away rape won’t cut it any more.

Of course there is a third way and it is the path that  our recent experience tells us we can expect the Romney/Ryan team to choose: obfuscate and create confusion. It seems to be working as far as their dishonest effort to claim that it’s actually the Obama Administration that will cut Medicare.  This strategy suggests that there’s no compelling reason to try to be intellectually consistent, which is in line with the Romney campaign’s decsion to keep the candidate’s actual positions as hazy as possible; as a Romney campaign staffer declared:

Campaigns that are about specifics, particularly in today’s environment, get tripped up

Evidently, Todd Akin didn’t get that memo. Sadly for him, the “specifics” he dredged up are spurious, pseudo-medical sounding garbage that have been used by anti-abortion fanatics for decades to imply that all women who get abortions are sluts. The task his gaffe sets for  for the rest of us? We can try to get some clarity from Romney and Ryan about where they really stand on women’s welfare issues, with the all-out zealots or the politically cautious zealots.

According to Michael Mahoney, GOP establishment darling Ann Wagner, accompanied by GOP legislative has-been, Jim Talent, will hold a news conference to kick-off the Wagner general election campaign for the newly configured 2nd House district.  Mahoney’s preview speculates that they’ll give us a look at Wagner’s campaign strategy:

They’ll go after president Obama’s record on the economy. They’ll claim he “failed”, and cite the fact that the unemployment rate has been over 8% for 42 months. They’ll also promote the ‘America’s Comeback Team’. That’s the name the Romney campaign has rolled out after the weekend selection of Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate.

In other words, they’ll not deviate from standard GOP slogans. It’s just so much easier to paint-by-numbers.

Touting the “come-back team” (because we would “come-back” to failed Bush administration policies?), while decrying the economy is, of course a predictable  approach, but not without risk, given what we now know about Paul Ryan’s role in planning the the last three and a half years of GOP congressional obstructionism, a course of action meant to do nothing more than damage the President by stalling the economic recovery – regardless of how much harm such a strategy would do to regular Americans.

Robert Draper in his recently published book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the US House of Representatives, writes that Ryan was one of the GOP congressional leaders who attended a dinner in Jaunary of 2009 in which just this policy of obstructionism was explicitly planned:

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

Draper is not alone. Greg Sargent comments on what he calls “juicy nuggets” in Michael Grunwald’s new book, The New New Deal, that:

… shed new light on the degree to which Republicans may have decided to deny Obama all cooperation for the explicit purpose of rendering his presidency a failure – making it easier for them to mount a political comback after their disastrous 2008 losses.

Sadly, what’s also predictable is the probable willingness of the traditional press to report GOP slogans without comment in preference to ferreting out the more complex truth. Although I’d love to be wrong, it’s not likely that any intrepid Missouri newsman will challenge Wagner and Talent to respond to the now well-substantiated allegations of orchestrated, intentional obstructionism and so take ownership of the slow-as-syrup economic recovery their Grand Old Party has engineered.

*Slightly edited.  

…except for Mitt Romney (r).

Paul Ryan (r), with Bob Schieffer on 60 Minutes tonight:

Bob Schieffer: How many years of, uh, tax returns did you, uh, turn over to [crosstalk] the campaign?

Paul Ryan: Well, it, it was a very exhaustive, uh, uh, vetting process. It’s a confidential bri vetting process, so there were several years, but…

Previously:

The question (August 11, 2012)

Tax Returns: maybe he just handed them everything in a shoe box (August 12, 2012)

Over the past 24 hours, the left blogosphere is filled with analysis of Paul Ryan’s record and his love of Ayn Rand.

Here is the minute 2009 video that everyone needs to remember when he read that Ryan is no longer a true Rand believer.

Ryan asserts it is Rand’s kind of thinking that we need now that Obama is President.      

Let’s listen to the critique of the Rand philosophy from the sainted William Buckley.

It is about 1:40 where Buckley talks about having Whittabker Chambers writing a review of Atlas Shrugged that is worth hearing.

Here is a copy of that review that Buckley amusingly references.  [That this is on freerepublic adds to the problem facing Ryan’s love of Rand.]

Here is the paragraph that Buckley references. [The reference to the dollar sign refers to the last passage of the book when one of the heroes traces a dollar sign in the air and not (as Chambers noted) the Cross.]

The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind, which finds this one natural to it, shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ” To the gas chambers – go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture – that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the differences between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

And, this is the kind of thinking Ryan asserts we need today: a rigid philosophy that leads to a final solution to those who resist.

Remember these are the words from saints of the Respectable Right and not from dirty, smelly hippies of the disreputable Left.  

Today Mitt Romney announced that he had capitulated to radical rightwingers in his party and chosen Paul Ryan (of Ryancare fame) as his Vice-Presidential pick. In case you’re not familiar with Ryan’s claim to fame, his budget (which Romney – in spite of his efforts today to pretend otherwise – has repeatedly endorsed), the following video will tell you all you need to know:

Pretty dreadful, right? Bear in mind that the issue of Ryan’s awful economic theories goes far beyond the presidential race. Todd Akin – along with most GOP House candidates – has also endorsed the radical and cruel Ryan budget. A vote for  Romney is a vote for Ryancare, a vote for Akin will double the damage, and sending GOPers back to the House will more than tripple the harm that Paul Ryan will manage, through their agency, to do to the middle class.

The selection of Ryan is not only problematic from an economic point of view,  however. I noted above that Romney is reluctant to emphasize his past endorsement of the Ryan plan, which suggests an additional concern about his ability to function as President. What does it say about his character, when he tries to weasel out of his own VP pick, deny his own stated economic beliefs – while touting a vague Romney budget plan that has not yet been vetted – and which, hence, cannot be criticized as thoroughly as the unpopular Ryan budget? Only fools think that in the political sphere they can always, in the words of the aphorism, have their cake and eat it too. Apropos of which, Ed Kilgore writes:

I struggle for a suitable analogy: becoming a Lutheran and saying you’ll maintain your own views on the sufficiency of faith for salvation? Hiring Mike Leach to coach your football team but reserving the right to tell him to install the Wishbone Offense? Marrying Kim Kardashian on condition she will avoid publicity?

Of course, any assumption that Romney would differ from Ryan on important issues like Medicare presupposes that his right-wing billionaire support base would even permit that type of independence. Romney certainly hasn’t had what it takes to stand up to the new, hardcore, fringewing GOP so far, which is why his running mate is a man described by The Globe and Mail as the ” Tea Party’s favourite nerd,” or an “intellectual version of Sarah Palin.” Intellectual in this context, of course, means that Ryan can speak in coherent sentences.

A release from Teresa Hensley’s (D) campaign:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 11, 2012

[….]

TERESA HENSLEY COMMENTS ON SELECTION OF PAUL RYAN AS VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE

Columbia, MO – Today, Cass County Prosecutor and congressional candidate in Missouri’s 4th Congressional district Teresa Hensley issued the following statement in response to the selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as vice presidential nominee.

“Now more than ever it is clear that the number one issue in this election is the ultimate survival of the Medicare program. Governor Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate has potentially put the architect of the plan to end Medicare as we know it a heartbeat away from the presidency.

“The Ryan selection, coupled with Congresswoman Hartzler’s votes in support of ending Medicare as we know it – which would cost seniors $6,400 more per year in order to protect tax breaks for millionaires and subsidies for oil companies – is the defining moment in this election cycle.

“This issue is not about partisan politics.  Medicare has helped Democrats and Republicans alike.  It’s about making commonsense decisions about protecting our seniors and balancing the budget the right way.  That means looking out for Missouri’s middle class and making sure millionaires and big oil companies pay their fair share. I’m running to stand up for middle class families and seniors and this November voters will have a clear choice between my commonsense agenda, and an agenda that recklessly ends Medicare as we know it.”

###

Previously:

Teresa Hensley (D) in Warrensburg – May 17, 2012 [May 17, 2012]

[….]

Teresa Hensley (D): ….When we look at what the House Republicans and Vicky Hartzler have done just this year, not to mention last year, but just this year, still passing again the [Republican House Budget Committee Chairman] Paul Ryan budget. And every time I say, the Paul Ryan budget you should feel free to boo. [voices: “Boo!”] Because it is just a terrible, terrible thing for them to think that they could be proud of it. And they are. Have you noticed that they’re not ashamed at all about the Paul Ryan budget? They don’t hang their head, they don’t walk around acknowledging that they would rather give more tax breaks, more federal subsidies to billionaires and big oil companies and still make cuts in things like Medicare, and Social Security, and food stamps, and Pell Grants, the very things that mean everything to us as a middle class…

[….]

And:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r) wants to kill Medicare… [April 6, 2011]

[….]

The reviews keep coming in. Paul Ryan laid an egg. And Vicky Hartzler is content to clap louder.

And:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): town hall in Blue Springs, part 3 [May 1, 2011]

[….]

….Uh, here’s another comparison. Current path, the [exaggerated] Path to Prosperity, erity, erity. I’m sorry [laugh]. Anyway….

[….]

The choice in November is clear.