The Thing That Ate the GOP

In what is surely the leading nominee to date for dramatic understatement of the year, FoxNews.com reports that Paul Ryan's latest budget, debuting tomorrow, "would have a better chance of passing the Republican-controlled House than the Democrat-controlled Senate."

There are literally hundreds of billions of reasons for that--among them, an untreatable case of obsessive-compulsive disorder--but the principal reason is that Speaker John Boehner tasked Budget Chairman Ryan with conceiving a GOP reelection script rather than a budget document.

Ryan, being partial to Ed Wood's oeuvre, as well as being as talented as Ed Wood, has thus produced an abominable science fiction-horror work absent any suspense and all taste. We've already seen this thing, many times over. But to the GOP it never gets old.        

"It" being, of course, the repeal of ObamaCare. Yes, it's back, right there in Ryan's script; the GOP's monstrous thirtysomething tic that just won't die, because its campy camp followers won't let it. Merely chanting the words--Repeal ObamaCare!--is for the Republican base a groin-tingling act possessed of rapturous significance and doctrinaire reassurance. All is right with the world, as long as their directors give them the bogeyman of ObamaCare to fear and loathe.

Yet we should acknowledge that this time around Paul Ryan, in his promotion tour, is giving us a little something a bit special: a whole new theory of elections and representative democracy. From "Fox News Sunday":

CHRIS WALLACE: [ObamaCare] was a big issue in the campaign between Romney-Ryan vs. Obama-Biden. They think they won....

RYAN: I would argue against your premise that we lost this issue in the campaign. We won the senior vote.

I confess I find Ryan's theory intriguing. Presidential elections aren't broad mandates, or even the choosing of a national leader; they are instead statistical chop-shops in which the losers become the winners--the true and legitimate voice of The People, as defined by select audience reactions to alternative endings.

Many critics will bemoan tomorrow's release with pompous outrage and stuffy sophistication. But I, for one, shall enjoy "The Day of the Ghouls." It's vintage Ryan.

Comments

[Bulworth]

Putting "repeal" in the budget stakes out an extreme stance that can force the Administration to move its way in the negotiations.

Although I don't think Congress actually passes real budgets anymore--just continuing resolutions every few months.

[MinneapolisPipe]

Brilliance on the Ed Wood reference.

[Robert Lipscomb]

Courtesy fo Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space":

Jeff Trent: So what if we *do* develop this Solanite bomb? We'd be even a stronger nation than now.
Eros: [with disgust] Stronger. You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Jeff Trent: That's all I'm taking from you!
[pistol-whips Eros upside the head]

and then ...

Tanna: What do you think will be the next obstacle the Earth people will put in our way?
Eros: Well, as long as they can think - we'll have our problems.

Oh hell, the whole damned script reads like Fox News Sunday.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/quotes

[RT]

@Bulworth: "Although I don't think Congress actually passes real budgets anymore--just continuing resolutions every few months."

Heck, Congress might pass a declaration of war before it passes another budget resolution.

[Turgidson]

They won the senior vote in part because that's the one age group they promised NOT to starve. And you know, that boy in the White House...

But sure, you lost pretty much every other age group, but those votes don't count for as much because Benghazi. So go ahead and write another Randroid wet dream magis asterisk budget, you cruel fucking fraud.

So tedious, these GOP clowns.

[Chris Andersen]

Yeah, and if all those black people hadn't voted in 2008 then McCain would be President.