Snark in Pictures - Thanksgiving, Pope Francis, Filibusters and Obamacare

Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers!

The Extremist Love Affair With Paul Ryan

I'm not sure how the Romney campaign thinks they can appeal to independents and centrists with the Paul Ryan pick. He is a candidate that mainly appeals to extremists and oddballs of the Republican Party.

While Romney can flip-flop because he has held less conservative positions in the past, Ryan has been too far-right to etch-a-sketch himself. And to make that worse, he has inspired starry-eyed man-crushes from conservatives who are hate-mongers and near-sociopaths. So he can't erase their statements either. Why would they love him if he wasn't a radical extremist?

In May 2012, ex-VP and scary-guy Dick Cheney said:

"I worship the ground that Paul Ryan walks on. I think he's an enormously talented individual and he's trying to do the right thing, and he deserves all the support we can give him. And I hope he doesn’t run for president because that would ruin a good man who has a lot of work to do." (via Think Progress )

Ryan also has a long-standing mutual admiration society with Glenn Beck, wingnut guru of the bizarre. In 2010, we have the following on-air encounter, Transcript Via Media Matters:

BECK: I don't follow the people day-to-day in Washington, but I hear -- when I hear names over and over again, I look into them. Paul Ryan is a name I keep hearing, just, you know, "He's a god among conservatives."

. . . Hello, Congressman. How are you, sir?

RYAN: Hey, nice to meet you.

BECK: Nice to meet you, sir. Tell me -- tell me -- tell me your thoughts on progressivism.

RYAN: Right. What I have been trying to do, and if you read the entire Oklahoma speech or read my speech to Hillsdale College that they put in their Imprimis magazine -- you can get them on my Facebook page -- what I've been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism. Because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big-government problems that are plaguing us today. And so, to me, it's really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate --

BECK: I love you.

RYAN: -- so people can actually see what this ideology means, and where it's going to lead us, and how it attacks the American idea. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Glenn Beck Program, 4/12/10]


Transcript Via Media Matters

Then they went on to agree that "Progressivism is a Cancer" on sociey (see below), and somehow anyone who has a progressive idea is "influenced by Austrian intellectuals" in the big bad city of Madison, WI, while the good folks in tiny Janesville, Ryan's hometown, were more influenced by the founding fathers and God Almighty.

BECK: OK. Hang on just a second. I -- did you see my speech at CPAC?

RYAN: Yeah, I've read it. I didn't see it. I've read a transcript of it.

BECK: OK. I think we're saying the same thing. I call it --

RYAN: We are saying the same thing.

BECK: it's a cancer.

RYAN: Exactly. Look, I come from -- I'm calling you from Janesville, Wisconsin --

BECK: Holy cow.

RYAN: -- where I'm born and raised, where we raised our family, 35 miles from Madison. I grew up hearing about this stuff. This stuff came from these German intellectuals to Madison, University of Wisconsin, and then sort of out from there at the beginning of the last century. So, this is something we are familiar with where I come from.

It never sat right with me, and as I grew up, I learned more about the Founders and reading the Austrians and others, that this is really a cancer. Because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature, and turns it on its head and says, "No, no, no, no. They come from government. And we here in government are here to give you your rights and therefore ration, redistribute, and regulate your rights." It's a complete affront of the whole idea of this country. And that is, to me, what we as conservatives -- or classical liberals, if you want to get technical --

BECK: Thank you.

RYAN: -- ought to be doing to flush this out. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Glenn Beck Program, 4/12/10]

Ryan sounds just like Sarah Palin from backwater Alaska, or like any number of Glenn Beck's anti-intellectual cuckoo followers who believe they own American history somehow, unlike we scary Democrats who simply can't understand their "pure" vision of what the United States is supposed to be. Like the Harvard-educated Rick Santorum, Ryan is just a hypocrite who makes it sound as if he has never left his small town, even though he was thoroughly educated at public Miami university in Ohio - *where more scary intellectuals dwell* - and he is also a seven-term congressman who has lived in Washington DC for years, not in tiny Janesville, WI. Dare I mention that he received "progressive" help in the form of Social Security benefits that helped pay for his public education? Dare I mention he is paid a salary by the big-bad-government right now, and would again if he ever becomes VP ~ which is looking less-likely every day, but still... voters should look at the way Ryan has lived as a public servant with "progressive" health care and benefits for his family. Actually, just like Santorum and Palin, "cognitive dissonance" is the right term for Ryan's opinions - the contradiction between the way Ryan has actually lived his life and what he says to ultra-conservatives like Beck. Constantly running for office while slamming big-government.

Finally, Rush Limbaugh loves the guy - need I say more?

Quotes via Politico:

“We now have somebody on the ticket who’s us,” Limbaugh said of the newly named Republican vice-presidential nomineee. “[Somebody] who can explain all of this, who believes all of this in his heart, in his soul, and he can do it with optimism and a smile on his face.”

. . . “The pick signals a decision was made somewhere that … we’re going to go head-first, going to take it straight to them and we’re going to win or we’re going to lose [but we are going to] articulate exactly what we believe,” Limbaugh said.
He added later, “The presence of Paul on stage with Romney has elevated Romney … Romney’s a new guy.”

As Ed Schultz put it last night:

Mitt Romney has picked the most radical Vice President in the history of the Republican Party.

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Why Sympathy for Dick Cheney is Nearly Impossible

When Vice President Dick Cheney had heart-transplant surgery the other day, Republicans (and probably even some Dems) were dismayed or even outraged by the instantaneous snark heaped upon the man, tweets questioning whether he ever had a heart to begin with. And it does seem a little sad that a man who was Vice President of the United States for eight long . . . and I mean really, really long . . . years is held in such low esteem by so many people. I can't think of any other VP's who have such a negative image. Dan Quayle couldn't spell "potato" but I was sorry to hear he had deep-vein thrombosis from riding around on airplanes.

Interestingly, Dick Cheney had the same blood-clotting problem, along with years of other heart trauma. Why do we treat him differently than Quayle? Well, Quayle was clueless but he was basically a nice guy, and his gaffes only made him seem more human. Cheney - not so much. He seemed almost supernaturally cold and inhuman in all his dealings. He could never speak without a sneer and a snarl, even while talking matter-of-factly about plans to go to war with Iraq, no matter what the cost, and ignoring the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And while no one was sorry to see Saddam Hussein overthrown, Cheney and his sympathizers have to understand that the guy is out of luck when it comes to empathy from real human beings.

Cheney is just too cold, smug, and indifferent for most of us to care. His calculations for starting an unecessary war in the hopes of gaining new oil for his Haliburton Empire are his legacy now, along with bad memories of Abu Ghraib prison. Funny how he knew so much about Saddam's nuclear prospects and could round up so many usual suspects, but he never could seem to track down Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan - the present admininistration solved that for him instead.

For some comedians he will always be that old guy who shot his "friend" in the face with birdshot down in Texas. For others now, he will forever be the guy who was given a free heart pump for 20 months and then a free heart transplant paid for by our tax dollars at a time when most members of his party want to cut out health insurance for the poor and indigent. As Representative Alan Grayson once described the Republican Health Care Plan, "Part One - don't get sick; Part Two - if you get sick, die quickly." Dick Cheney could be the poster-grandpa for why everyone deserves good health care into advanced old age. Yet most people feel that he never gave a damn about the public, so why care about him? And since karma is a bitch, people will keep making jokes comparing him to Darth Vader, the Tin Man, and the Grinch with a heart two-sizes too small.