Genius of Right Wing Brainlessness Can Nowhere Be Better Summarized than in US Representative Paul Ryan’s Statement about a Boy and a Free School Lunch — I Make a Point that Goes beyond that Made by the Rest of the Media

© 2014 Peter Free

 

11 March 2014

 

 

Some people are brilliantly manipulative but  . . .

 

If what they say is examined, we see that they are egregiously moronic at the same time.  The Young (White) Lion of the Republican Right, Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, falls into this group.

 

He is a man with a gift for being intelligent enough to fool those who aren’t.  Which, in some ways, fully describes the state of American political culture.

 

 

 

The words at issue

 

From the lips of one of America’s preeminently nasty fools, the stalwartly earnest-appearing Representative Paul Ryan —spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference:

 

 

The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that.

 

 

This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my buddy, Governor Scott Walker.

 

She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch.

 

He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids.

 

He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.

 

© 2014 Glenn Kessler, A story too good to check: Paul Ryan and the tale of the brown paper bag, Washington Post (06 March 2014) (paragraph split)

 

 

What Representative Ryan intended and what he said are two different things — the juxtaposition of which characterize so much of Right Wing bullshit

 

Representative Ryan wants America to think that giving Government “stuff” away empties its recipients’ souls of the Lord’s content.  Or alternatively, only the Devil’s Spawn would stoop so low as to accept a handout.

 

Thus, by implication:

 

(a) Government handouts turn free-loaders into moral scum

 

or

 

(b) only (deservedly despised) moral scum benefit from the freeloading.

 

However, if you look at Ryan’s butchering of his own pretended example, he completely missed what his (apparently imaginary) boy is actually saying — which is that he:

 

(a) wants someone to care about him enough to feed him

 

or

 

(b) he did not want to be easily distinguished from the other kids, who do have someone who cares about them.

 

Nowhere in Ryan’s parable is the boy’s presumed statement that he does not want to eat, lest he be turned into soulless scum.

 

 

Even within Ryan’s own (not fact-checked) story, there is not the point that Government lunch handouts are bad for the soul and, therefore, bad policy

 

Paul Ryan has an admirable political talent for manipulating his fellow passengers in the Boatload of Air-Headedness to Nowhere — as Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler and the Comedy Channel’s Jon Stewart demonstrated by fact-checking the brown bag-wishing schoolboy:

 

 

Glenn Kessler, A story too good to check: Paul Ryan and the tale of the brown paper bag, Washington Post (06 March 2014) (with embedded Paul Ryan video clip about the school lunch boy)

 

Catherine Thompson, Jon Stewart Shreds Paul Ryan's Free School Lunch Fib (VIDEO), Talking Points Memo [TPM] (11 March 2014) (with embedded video clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart)

 

Three points:

 

 

(1) Glenn Kessler’s fact-checking demonstrated that Paul Ryan’s school lunch parable is based on something that never happened, which Ryan then lifted from a context actually intended to promote (not destroy) the school lunch program.

 

(2) Comedian Jon Stewart synopsized Ryan’s disconnect from truth with genius conciseness.  (The key summarizing paragraph occurs at 1:11 to 1:50 into the clip.)

 

(3) And I point out that Ryan’s own parable, even within its own “accepted as true” confines, does not make the point that the Representative intended.

 

 

The moral? — Bad facts, idiot story — which will, nevertheless, scoop up followers on America’s Teary Trail to Perdition

 

Representative Ryan’s dishonest and foolishly analyzed parable:

 

 

(a) gives us insight into the poor intellectual (and arguably moral) quality of the Right Wing’s political leadership

 

and

 

(b) provides us an appreciation for the (often self-destructive) ineptitude of those who follow them like brain-depleted sheep.

 

Hence, a larger parable describing American political culture.

 

Let us pray.