Asshat of the Day

By now, surely everyone has heard that Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan to be his running mate, so I'll turn the proceedings over to the irreplacable Charles Pierce.

We're not worthy, Charlie.


Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he's ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.

To add my two cents: I would not vote for Mitt Romney if he was the Last Presidential Candidate on Earth and God Hirself was holding a gun to my head. I cannot believe any rational American citizen would contemplate putting this sleazy, arrogant, dishonest, lying slimeball into the highest office of the land.

But his pick of Paul Ryan for VP only solidifies my contempt. Paul Ryan, after all, wants to dismantle Medicare as we know it, turning it into a voucher system. No, make that a coupon system--you're given a fixed amount to purchase healthcare (just as a store coupon takes only fifty cents or a dollar off the actual cost of the merchandise), and if the annual cost of healthcare is rising beyond the value of your coupon, well, too bad, so sad, you have to make up the difference.

I didn't pay my Medicare taxes for all these years--fifty years by the time I retire--to have the system yanked out from under me just because Paul Ryan has some kind of juvenile Ayn Rand obsession.

Together, these two Twitrands constitute the worst Presidential ticket I have seen in my lifetime.

Vulture/Voucher 2012--"You People Are On Your Own"

Vote for them at your peril.