I Think William Saletan Wrote His Endorsement Of Paul Ryan While High

by evanmcmurry

Am I the only one who thinks the normally reliable William Saletan did a bunch of wippets before writing this article?

Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn’t just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals.  My liberal friends point out that Ryan’s plan leaves many details unclear. That’s true. But show me another Republican who has addressed the nation’s fiscal problems as candidly and precisely as Ryan has. He’s got the least detailed budget proposal out there, except for all the others.

Perhaps that’s because others aren’t attempting to completely obliterate the social safety net under the guise of eliminating the deficit. Pull any thread of Ryan’s budget—transportation funding, education funding, health care funding, veterans programs, services for the poor—and the entire thing unravels into a scheme to cut services in order to pay for a seismic upper-class tax break. That’s the opposite of candid and precise. It’s mendacious and obfuscatory.

More:

Ryan refutes the Democratic Party’s bogus arguments. He knows that our domestic spending trajectory is unsustainable and that liberals who fail to get it under control are leading their constituents over a cliff, just like in Europe.

Yeah, those Democrats who were in charge from 2000-2008 when federal spending went from a massive, Clinton-era surplus to the biggest deficit in history really screwed the pooch. Also, half the European countries currently in trouble did not have out of control spending, but were victims of a private-sector housing bubble. But don’t let the fact that your point makes no sense stop you from writing another 800 or so words of this nature. (And, as has been pointed out, Ryan’s budget would steer us much closer toward another European country that’s not doing so hot.)

For the first half of Saletan’s article, I literally thought he was joking. He’s not. For a regular reader of Saletan, who’s usually incisive and insightful, this is weird.