What Is The GOP? Forget The Teabagging Idiots And The American Taliban For A Moment And Let's Focus on Paul Ryan & Jim DeMint

No... worse than Vitter

Ryan's a spoiled, pampered Big Business crybaby and DeMint's the obnoxious class bully who no one ever slapped down. Together they're what the Republican Party is all about. Let's take a look at the pathetic Wall Street shill from Wisconsin first. Thanks to the DCCC, Ryan doesn't have to worry about being reelected, even though he "represents" a district Obama won in 2008, a district that is chock full of local Democratic legislative leaders. So instead of campaigning for reelection, he's running around with his massive warchest, supplied by his grateful pals on Wall Street, and making mischief everywhere. But that isn't why the "wild" Young Gun missed the unveiling of the silly GOP Pledge last week. As Talk radio host John Batchelor reported at the Daily Beast, Ryan was peeved... and pouting. Ryan, who Wall Street has fingered as a future President (of the United States) "is supposed to be the gifted ingénue who spent these last years in the minority bent over his spread sheets while he tweaked his grindingly wonkish genius of 2008, 'A Roadmap for America’s Future'.”

Ryan’s flacks claim his absence was a scheduling problem, which is a deliberately uncreative excuse. Ryan’s allies say he skipped the event because he’s genuinely stumped about why the leadership ignored his celebrated “Roadmap” that lays out a utopia in which America would solve health care, Social Security, taxes and jobs with Leprechaun dust and diligence. Nothing of Ryan’s years of homework is to be found in the “Pledge,” and the absence is so obvious that the whispering is that Ryan is either in fresh disfavor or worse, self-exile.

“He’s been very coy,” says an ally. “He’s not talked in about a month. He’s caught in the middle. He doesn’t know what to do. They ignored his Roadmap.”

Another ally is more mocking: “His scene got left on the cutting room floor.”

Says another observer: “Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy didn’t think as much of his ‘Roadmap’ as the (Wall Street) Journal does. (They think) it’s a ‘Roadmap’ to the minority.”

One critic says of Ryan’s relationship with Boehner, “He wants more love from Daddy.”

Ryan has cause to believe he has fallen in stature in the Republican Conference. John Boehner not only did not ask for Ryan’s help on the “Pledge,” but also Boehner’s flacks claim that the boss correctly handed the construction of the “Pledge to America” to a member who pulled off the pretentious gimmick of “Listening to America”-- the two-term California back-slapper Kevin McCarthy, a man not known for policy cogitation of any sort. In fact, the general suspicion is that the document was cooked by a Boehner flack named Brian Wild, whose mission was to heat the stew-- “we go forward now with optimism”-- until it disappeared into instantly inedible, forgettable jargon.

The “Pledge” stunt is not Ryan’s only problem with Boehner and the Republican team. There is also the fiasco of the recent vanity publication, “Young Guns,” co-authored with the same schmoozer McCarthy and the big money man in the leadership, Whip Eric Cantor. The book is a sluggish presentation of the innocuous and the inane. Sipping what we are told are Diet Cokes and bottled water, Cantor says to Ryan, “We’ve got to reconnect and inspire the American people.” Ryan replies to Cantor, “The American people still love the American idea.” McCarthy contributes the factoid, “We have four million more government jobs in America than manufacturing jobs.” Several dozens of these heart-stopping exchanges create the impression that a colloquy of congressional stars is not unlike the Jonas Brothers discussing what they got each other for their birthdays.

Not surprisingly, Paul Ryan is said to be in deep despair over the fact, suddenly revealed, that “Young Guns” is hack work and that, in the videos and still photos, he has been exposed as a trivial faceman.
“Ryan is embarrassed by the whole thing,” reports a close observer, not a foe. “He shouldn’t have done that. He made a mistake. He did Greta (Greta van Sustern show on Fox News Channel) to put a happy face on this thing.”

“He caved on TARP, he caved on the Roadmap, poor Paul Ryan,” measures a conservative Republican, summarizing correctly that Ryan voted with Boehner and Cantor on the infamous and Mark-of-Cain TARP of 2008; and that Ryan’s “Roadmap” is an irritation to the Conference, the tedious work of an acolyte who tries to outshine his professor as if politics is a spelling-bee. “The book (Young Guns) was Cantor’s and McCarthy’s idea. Ryan is ashamed.”

There is yet a deeper problem for Ryan, and it may also be pushing him into this unusual sullenness. Many Republican wags, such as David Frum and Erik Ericson, are already onto the Boehner paint-by-numbers game of the “Pledge.” The document is worse than hollow, because it illustrates that the Republican ambitions are not anything about policy or philosophy or even passion. They are about conquest on K Street and dividing up the plunder of majority...

Meanwhile, back in Wisconsin where Ryan doesn't have a care in the world. A former candidate for his seat told me in confidence that his protector inside the Democratic caucus has always been... (no one knows this; you're reading it first here) Rep. David Obey! I was startled too. But the ex-candidate won't go any further so... instead let's skip to a post at One Wisconsin Now where they're offering the audio to this remark the pouty Ryan made Monday night:

So, the mistake we made-- the Republicans-- was we committed the greatest sin in politics: the sin of hypocrisy. When you run as fiscal conservatives, when you run on the principles of economic liberty and you don't govern that way, that's hypocrisy. That's what happened to the republicans. Republicans, a lot of us, fought the earmark culture and all those other things, but we lost. Because, the more senior, you know, uh, power guys, they kind of had this belief: we can take this Democratic machine and make it a Republican machine. And what happened was our principles atrophied. We've got to get that back.

Yes... atrophied. And then there's Jim DeMint, the new arbiter of all things senatorial. Apparently McConnell, Kyl, Cornyn and the GOP caucus just doesn't care that DeMint and his teabagger coalition have now taken over.

Sen. Jim DeMint warned his colleagues Monday night that he would place a hold on all legislation that has not been “hot-lined” by the chamber or has not been cleared by his office before the close of business Tuesday. Although the South Carolina Republican has objected for years to the hot-lining of legislation until his staff at the Republican Steering Committee has reviewed it, DeMint’s threat to essentially shut down legislation in the chamber is remarkable. [...]

[I]n a terse e-mail sent to all 100 Senate chiefs of staff Monday evening, Steering Committee Chief of Staff Bret Bernhardt warned that DeMint would place a hold on any legislation that had not been hot-lined or been cleared by his office before the close of business Tuesday. [...]

Democratic and Republican aides alike were stunned, arguing that DeMint had essentially made a unilateral decision to end legislative activity in the Senate.

Arlen Specter went even further yesterday in what is likely to be one of his last-ever Senate speeches, making an unambiguous attack on DeMint's fanaticism in a body where they normally all refer to each other as distinguished colleagues: "Mainstream Americans must march to the polls this November to express themselves forcefully to stop extremists financed by undisclosed contributors from stifling our democracy.

“Within days of the start of the Obama administration, before the ink was dry on his oath of office, Republicans openly bragged about plans to ‘break him and engineer his Waterloo.' Announcing that ideological purity was more important than obtaining a majority, the prevailing Republican motto was, ‘We’d rather have 30 Marco Rubios in the Senate than 50 Arlen Specters.’”

Yes, I'm afraid it's the unserious face of today's Republican Party