Paul Ryan's Very Red Meat

When I came home from World War II, someone persuaded me to attend a Communist lecture where the speaker listed everything wrong in America from high prices to flat feet, then proclaimed, “All this, of course, is a result of the capitalist system.”

Listening to the GOP VP nominee last night brought back the same sensation that caused my brain to slam shut back then, but with an added dimension. In tossing red meat to convention goers, the clean-cut American boy outdid even that Red agitator of yore.

Paul Ryan blames Barack Obama for everything wrong in America, including the havoc he and his Tea Party comrades have been wreaking for four years.

The economic crisis, he says, “began with a perfect Triple-A credit rating for the United States; it ends with a downgraded America,” omitting only that it resulted from a phony debt-ceiling crisis he and his intransigent followers created.

In this inverted Ryanworld, where supporters wear cheese slabs on their heads, the would-be VP smirks that “by his own decisions, President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him, and more than all the troubled governments of Europe combined...

“Republicans stepped up with good-faith reforms and solutions equal to the problems. How did the president respond? By doing nothing except to dodge and demagogue the issue.”

The “reforms and solutions,” of course, were Ryan’s own extremist proposals to gut social programs for the old and poor while preserving tax cuts for the richest, a philosophy he no longer attributes to his fallen idol Ayn Rand but former pro quarterback Jack Kemp of the Reagan era.

And so on and on. In this topsy-turvy time, Ryan and Romney can propose to save Medicare while planning to gut it and reap temporary gains in the opinion polls.

After Ryan’s performance, where does Mitt Romney go tonight? The only place left (or rather, right) is to join Rush Limbaugh and blame Hurricane Isaac on Obama.

Update: The morning after brings a frenzy of reactions to Ryan’s lies, distortions and omissions. Those with strong stomachs can find some of them here, here and here. And here.