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.

There was a very brief, but interesting letter to the editor (Titled “Before and After“) in today’s (Aug. 8) St. Louis Post-Dispatch – the writer claimed that politicians are making big promises right now, but when, after the election, the dust settles, the GOP will look out for the rich, the Democrats will work for the poor, and the middle class be dammed. The writer’s rhetoric is, however, sadly behind the times. Take for instance the old GOP standby, the claim that Democrats want to raise taxes,  and then consider this video about the Romney tax plan:

You can calculate your own savings at the new Website, RomneyPlan.org.

We’re going to hear the Democrats tax-and-spend mantra from the crop of GOPers who won their primaries in Missouri last night along with lots of similar lies from anonymously funded attack ads. GOP Senatorial candidate Todd Akin, for instance, has already attacked the new taxes that pay for the extension of insurance in the Obamacare law – even though they’re mostly levied on insurance providers and those with big incomes. Just keep in mind that the only parties who’ll see their taxes go down if Romney wins the election and we hand him a GOP House and Senate will be the millionaires and big corporations – entities that have, arguably, not been paying their fair share for some time.

Of course, we’re Democrats and the GOPers are right – taxes aren’t our be-all and end-all. We understand that taxes buy us the things we need to succeed and have a good quality of life. Unlike the Republicans who support the slash-and-burn economies of the Ryan budget, we understand that evaluating benefits is an integral part of benefit/cost analysis. Nevertheless, we don’t want to pay more taxes so that Mitt Romney, the Koch brothers, and monster corporations can pay less.

And as for the writer of the letter I cited and his claims pitting the poor against the middle class, please don’t get me wrong. I hope Democrats continue to worry about the poor along with the middle class – although maybe that desire is not entirely unselfish. Right now, Democrats are all that stand between the middle class and the poverty attendant on our growing inequality.  

Here is the Town Hall meeting with Representative Vicky Hartzler (r) in Sedalia, Missouri.

The Ryan Budget is a big gift to all of us, right and left, because it clearly shows us what the GOP stands for – nature red in tooth and claw where we struggle for survival of the fittest  – with a little extra help for our rich citizens who are probably considered to be the most fit because they can afford to pay Congress for the assistance.  This blatant embrace of the 1% is interesting because new research suggests that it does not really reflect the beliefs of the important if somewhat confused Tea Partiers who are popularly supposed to be playing an important role in the ever more rightward drift in the GOP itinerary.

Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, who have exhaustively researched the Tea Party phenomenon, have concluded that even those strident advocates for “liberty” from taxes, don’t really oppose government spending – as long as the spending is lavished on people they perceive as being like themselves. As Steven Teles summarizes it in The Washington Monthly:

In short, the fundamental principle of Tea Party activists is that government is fine when it’s helping people like them-hardworking, uncomplaining, non-mooching, self-restraining, religious (but not Muslim!), patriotic Americans-but it’s a threat when it’s helping people who are not like them. Screaming about the debt is really just the language Tea Party activists use to express their fear that the reins of government have been taken away from the people who actually make the society work, and given to a coalition of weirdos and parasites.

Which brings us to the three Republicans vying to represent their party in the race contesting Claire McCaskill’s Senate Seat. Their reactions to the Ryan budget provide a type of Rorschach test not only for the individuals involved, but for the degree to which they are actually attuned to attitudes that animate their base:

Todd Akin, a.k.a. Mr. Predictable, makes no bones about the fact that he wants to push even the lame, halt and starving little birdies out of what he views as a nest unfairly feathered by the  government at great cost to the rich:

This is a concrete plan that will put our economy back on track. Now is not a time to sit on the fence or to wait to see where the polls and political winds blow, it is time for action and leadership

Since almost no economists believe that the Ryan spending plan will do anything other than increase the deficit, gut the safety net and enrich the rich, this has to be a case of hard-core ideological blindness, disguised with the now cliched GOP efforts to paint Ryan as a bold thinker – or even as a thinker. Clearly, Akin would love to see the last of such programs as Medicare – and he might find that this attitude won’t endear him to the very folks he’s relying on to support him.

Sarah Steelman, the anointed candidate of the Tea Party Express if not all generic Tea Partiers in Missouri, is more in tune with the Tea Party mentality that Skocpol describes, albeit in a cautious fashion:

I would like to move towards a fairer flatter tax, shrink the size of government and balance the budget sooner. I am also taking a closer look at the Medicare revisions to make sure that Congress isn’t treated better than our seniors and that seniors have the option of staying with the current Medicare plan.

In other words, Steelman wants to deflect attention from the issue of privatizing Medicare, and tries to placate her Tea Party followers by reassuring them that if they suffer, she’ll make sure that Congress suffers too. Congress  is usually a fail-safe stalking horse. Notice that Steelman says nothing about making sure that the wealthy pick up their fair share of the load that the Ryan Budget foists off on the poor and middle class.

And John Brunner? Mr. No-Show does it again:

The third GOP candidate, St. Louis businessman John Brunner, said that Ryan showed “courage and leadership,” but declined to offer his views on the Wisconsin lawmaker’s proposed budget.

Interesting that Bruner chooses to emphasize “courage and leadership” while carefully showing neither. It seems that what he dubs the  “message of the citizen-senator against the career politician,” when speaking about his campaign, seems to be no more than an empty piece of paper.

No word yet about what the newest candidate, anti-stem cell guy Mark Memoly, thinks about budget priorities. I suspect it’ll be entertaining.

So there you have it. The old-line, crank right winger, Tea Party confusion and obfuscation, a corporate GOPer who stands for almost nothing but getting elected, and a cipher. And they want us to entrust them to watch out for programs like Medicare and Social Security that have sustained and built the middle classes, programs that even important segments of their own base support.    

Yesterday I noted in passing that the Ryan Budget gave the Pentagon more money than it had asked for or wanted. It is, of course, even worse than that – Rep. Ryan actually accused the generals – those folks the GOP are so keen that we defer to when their positions are more convenient – of lying (h/t Ed Kilgore):

We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice,” Ryan said during a forum on the budget sponsored by the National Journal. “We don’t think the generals believe their budget is really the right budget….

Kligore also notes that our own Rep. Todd Akin (R-2) also got into the act:

… The lament that the Pentagon must be protected from cuts reached the point in the Budget Committee markup last week that Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) began listing all the wars for which he felt America had been unprepared: He included “the War for Independence.”

Typical Todd. Embarrassing for Missourians, but aside from that does anyone wonder just why GOPers like Akin are so determined to shower unwanted funds on the military? Kilgore sees politics at play:

All in all, it appears House Republicans are so upset that they were backed into a bipartisan agreement last year (though it was basically an agreement not to agree, and to put into place a failsafe spending cut mechanism to punish them if they continued to fail to agree) that they want to put on a demonstration of what Congress would be like if there were no Democrats in it. Democrats should be very grateful.

And I am grateful. But I also wonder how much this determination to continue wasteful military spending has to do with defense industries at home. Pork in other words. That would explain Akin’s difficulties parsing the concepts attendant on military waste. Certainly explains why it’s now the done thing in GOP circles to question the judgment of the military managers they are usually so eager that everyone else defer to.  

It seems that every Missouri Republican present  in the House of Representatives today voted for Paul Ryan’s budget. They voted to:

— destroy Medicare as we know it;

— gut the safety net – food aid, Medicaid, educational grants, etc.;

— increase defense spending beyond the amount sought by the military chiefs;

— offer big-time tax cuts for the rich and corporations.

On top of this, because of the tax cuts and the increased military spending, they also effectively voted to increase the deficit. I repeat, they will increase the very deficit that they’ve been incessantly braying about for the past three years.

While it’s true that this budget probably won’t make it through our (endangered) Senate, it does break the agreement between the White House and the Republican leadership that was struck last year, and it will likely bring us a replay of the big government shutdown drama. The people putting this budget forward know that it is a nonstarter, and they know that it will be costly and destructive to our political processes, but they just don’t care. The all games, all the time, GOP prepares to strike again.

According to House Speaker John Boehner, the budget proposal is a “‘real vision'” of how Republicans would govern if they had more control of Washington.” And the folks here in Missouri who will continue to help realize that “vision” if they make it back to Congress when their terms are up: Todd Akin, Vicky Hartzler; Sam Graves, Billy Long, Jo Ann Emerson, and Blaine Luetkemeyer.  

A few weeks ago St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson decided to get all up in Mr. Obama’s face when the President, quite logically, issued health care guidelines guidelines that would require many Catholic hospitals, schools and charities to include contraception in their employees federally mandated preventative health care insurance. The Bishop got himself so worked up that he authored a pastoral letter that he required to be read aloud in every parish in the archdiocese. Nor was he mollified when the President modified his rule so that most church entities could escape even this indirect support for those parts of women’s health care that irks the institutional Church (as opposed to actual Catholics who overwhelmingly use birth control).

The bishop condemned the guidelines because he claimed that it would, by forcing the church to indirectly fund birth control, contravene the principle of “religious freedom” – in spite of the fact that birth control is, in terms of actual dogma, rather a peripheral issue. As Gary Wills points out:

Contraception is not even a religious matter. Nowhere in Scripture or the Creed is it forbidden. Catholic authorities themselves say it is a matter of “natural law,” over which natural reason is the arbiter-and natural reason, even for Catholics, has long rejected the idea that contraception is evil.

In essence the Archbishop was trying to play Big Daddy and tell us all that we have to observe Catholic Church preferences no matter the cost to the individual or the nature of our personal beliefs.

There is, however, a central tenet in current Catholic social teaching that is under political attack. That teaching goes by the name of the “preferential option for the poor” and was fully articulated by Pope John Paul II in 1991 in his encyclical Centesimus Annus. Although the current pope has attacked the Latin American liberation theology in which the principle was first described, he was careful to affirm the basic principle:

… love for widows and orphans, prisoners, and the sick and needy of every kind, is as essential as the ministry of the sacraments and preaching of the Gospel.

Sure, Benedict XVI also includes the unborn among the vulnerable classes (although he didn’t explicitly extend the protection to sperm and ovum), but the important point is that he supports the continued highest elevation of efforts to protect the poor and helpless.

It’s also a fact that this week the Republican Party has introduced a budget, the  Ryan Budget, that gives to the wealthy – an average $187,000 tax break to each millionaire, in fact. It manages to do so by taking from the poor, decimating safety-net programs such as food-stamps, Medicare, job training progams, educational aid – you name it, it disappears.

At the same time, the Missouri Senate passed a budget that supports education at the expense of the welfare of blind citizens. It strips $28 million from a health care program that provides care to those needy blind Missourians who do not inhabit the extreme depths of poverty necessary to qualify for Missouri’s Medicaid. This budgetary contortion comes on top of continued cuts to the state’s social programs over the past few years. At the same time the same legislators have seen fit to cut corporate taxes – cuts to the state’s already very low franchise tax, for instance, cost the state $85 million dollars in needed revenue.

I think we call this robbing the poor to give to the rich. Note that this reverse Robin Hood maneuver is the preferred sport of today’s fringe-dwelling Republican Party. And also note it’s the opposite of the “preferential option for the poor,” one of the most important of the Catholic social teachings.

So, to sum up, the facts are these: If Archbishop Carlson (and the rest of his confreres) are serious about standing up for the Church’s teachings, specifically about the protection of the vulnerable, we should expect to see the pastoral letters hitting the parishes right away. To be even more explicit, we should be hearing their condemnations of the entire Republican party, the perpetrator of these budget atrocities, anytime now. And until we do, I know just how much respect and credence I’m going to grant the fathers of my erstwhile church when they sit in their tax-exempt churches, collect tax-dollars to fund their good works, and whine about their “religious liberty.”

Addendum:  Just be clear, I’m not talking about some statement from the bishops that they don’t think the GOP budget strategies are very nice – I’m talking about having the church fathers fight for the preferential option for the poor with the same fervor they bring to their anti-abortion jihad. When I hear about a priest denying a catholic GOPer communion because of the GOP war on the poor, I’ll believe that the church stands behind all its teachings, not just the ones that best conform to the prejudices of a group of authoritarian, celibate males.

The posting guidelines for SMP caution posters about unnecessary invective, noting quite correctly that:

If you’re a good writer it’s relatively easy to show everyone else that someone is a stupid troglodyte without actually using those two words – and it’s much more fun to watch them slink away in silence after it finally dawns on them that they’ve been mocked into oblivion.

I, however, imperfect being that I am, struggle with that provision. There are certain epithets, usually having to do with intelligence, that, crude though they may be, seem to have been tailor made for certain Missouri politicos and it’s frustrating in the extreme to refrain calling it the way you see it. It seems, though, that I have company and the White House has been having the same problem. Today, on the topic of the Ryan Budget, Jay Carney finally let loose and socked its GOP cheering section with the observation that:  

… that Republicans who support the Paul Ryan budget’s cuts to education and clean energy have a “severely diminished capacity” and are “aggressively and deliberately ignorant” of the global economy.

I’ve got to admit that labels like “severely diminished capacity,” and even blunter designations – like “dim bulb” or plain, old, unvarnished “stupid” – have long been paired in my mind with the image of Rep. Todd Akin (R-2). And guess what? Todd has come out slugging for the Ryan Budget. Is that evidence of “severely diminished capacity” or what?

Not that Akin’s position is surprising. Nor is his basic complaint new, just hilarious. His nose has been perpetually out of joint because:

Under Republican leadership in the House, we have passed budgets which have died in the Democratic-controlled Senate which has not passed a budget in over 1,000 days. I am pleased with the product that Chairman Ryan and the House Budget Committee have produced to maintain our obligations to our constituents.

Even a sweet, naive creature such as myself can figure out that the budgets emanating from the House are not really meant seriously. That would require thinking about how to reach agreement with the Democratic Senate, which is to say, figuring out how to craft a balanced approach. The House’s budgets make no such concessions to the realities of governing in a two-party system, but are nothing so much as the caterwauling of unruly Tea Party Tomcats who want to mark their territory. And you know what that means – House budgets are going to stink  until somebody takes care of those Toms.

According to Akin:

Our fiscally responsible common sense FY2013 budget improves upon last year’s Path to Prosperity by saving another $20 billion in American taxpayer funds. Our House Republican budget cuts federal spending, makes responsible cuts to the real drivers of our national debt, ends special interest favoritism and corporate welfare, embraces an all-of-the-above energy strategy, and gives American taxpayers more control over their healthcare decisions.

Come again? According to most analysts, Ryan’s budget will decimate safety-net programs, give big tax breaks to the wealthy and, despite all the misery it causes, still manage to deepen the deficit. Oh, and did I fail to note that the fiscal assumptions upon which Ryan bases this masterpiece have been called out as pure fantasy?

But the best part of Akin’s endorsement is when he declares with a straight face:

This budget also protects the Medicare benefits of near-retirees and helps ensure the long-term solvency of the program.

Let’s see – as has been readily apparent to almost everyone, it’s clear that Ryan 2012 guts Medicare, turning it into an inadequately funded voucher program within ten years, a program that would essentially cut seniors’ access to care and double their costs, effectively “ending Medicare as we know it.” But it also, and this is amusing,  retains the cuts to Medicare that would have been made under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare). These are the same cuts that the GOP have been screaming about in ads directed at Claire McCaskill – cuts to the subsidies that are paid to inefficient Medicare Advantage suppliers.

Of course, on this point, Akin isn’t being totally obtuse, just honest. He’s wanted to end Medicare for a long time and recently observed that, “I don’t find in the Constitution that it is the job of the government to provide health care.” Of course, abandoning programs that work because of ideology is one of those positions that are located far out there in the land of “severely diminished capacity.”

Slightly edited for clarity.