As an official professor of rhetoric, I really just wish Paul Krugman was a better writer.
Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal …
What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.
I much prefer Bob Odenkirk’s profile of Ryan:
He’s a man of habits, believing that they “simplify life and make room for brainstorms.” A voracious reader of history, he’s been known to clip favorite words from books and eat them. Sometimes he’ll eat whole paragraphs. His New York Public Library card has been permanently revoked.
He doesn’t observe Tuesdays. He wears a watch that he smashed on purpose at exactly twelve o’clock. As a result, scheduling is not his strong suit. He famously missed his own birthday by three months.
He reads the Bible in Aramaic to himself through a bullhorn every night and says it’s the perfect mix of the old and the new.
He has three children by four women whom he has never met. He has adopted a man older than himself whom he has affectionately dubbed Grandbrother and with whom he trades birthday cards three times a year.
Yer jokin’, right?
I am. I figure y’all can recognize a pretty devastating bit of prose when you see one. I just threw in the Odenkirk for fun … and while I’m at it, if you haven’t seen this, you haven’t lived.
I know nobody clicks on links, but you’d be doing yourself, past present and future, a disservice if you didn’t.
Krgthulhu pretty pretty well eviscerates Ryan in that one. A true delight to read.
And then there is Mistah Charlie Pierce…
Indeed. A national treasure, that man.
a disposable nappy for the whole nation?
“Each time, something had gone awry, or afoul, or askew.”
Sounds like the lead-in to a Henny Youngman line about him and his wife.
“One time all three”.
Has nothing to do with your post, just had to finish it.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t anything after “wish” a subjunctive clause necessitating “were” not “was”. I wish I were king..etc.
You’re right. This error verifies that SEK is a real American, as it’s a mistake no educated Briton or second-language speaker makes.
I’m utterly exhausted with a new baby, so thank you for clarifying that and saving me neurons.
My uncle is a professor of Rhetoric at KU. I always wondered what that exactly meant. I always just didn’t answer his questions, assuming they were rhetorical questions.
Is that a candidate bio or a Dos Equis commercial?
Chuck Norris tribute?
Krugman is a good writer. But his columns, these days, suffer from a terrible tic of signposting — “I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, …”
You’ll note that as a good editor, I clipped his signposting. I’m actually not as annoyed with signposting as I used to be, mostly because it signifies that someone at least put thought into the structure of what they’d written. So much of what I read now is just painfully disorganized that even when I agree with it, my red pen sits in waiting.
That is also a blog post and not a column and different standards apply.
Reading the shit the major papers put on their op-ed pages these days, I’m doubtful of your assertion.
I thought this was supposed to work by transferring much more/most of the cost to the sick person. Thus becoming a classic case of an SEP. Not a simplified employee pension, nor the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy but somebody else’s problem —
A voucher system will work by empowering the consumer of medicine to choose whether or not to go ahead with the kidney transplant.
This will lead hospitals and doctors to agree that the customer is always right, and to compete for the dollars of kidney-transplant-needing patients.
he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work.
I’ll bet lower taxes are the answer!
lower taxes to Republicans = Alcohol to Homer Simpson
When you think about it, it’s amazing that the health care and insurance industries aren’t united in hysterical opposition to the Republican plan. The Rs claim that if we go to a voucher system, and then reduce the amount of federal money going into the system, the market will cause health care prices to fall. Now, this is pure fantasy as far as a mechanism goes, but the idea behind all this is that the system won’t break down because the doctors will take less money.
Where’s bradp to assert that Krugman is dishonest because look over there?
He’s busy complaining about trains.
Oh dear God almighty, that thread is painful. Poor Brad.
He brings it on himself by being a libertarian.
Yeah, but even if tough love is necessary, it’s sometimes wince-producing in the onlookers.
I’m so old I remember when you went to grad school for something completely different from rhetoric.
Me too. I’m a leaf in the wind, watch how I soar.
Serenity reference FTW.
This isn’t going to turn out well …
Well, just get us on the ground.
Oh, that is pretty definitely going to happen.
If I were dictator, I would sentence Joss Whedon to death for the ending of that scene.
Nah. Now killing off Bok, that was unforgivable. But Wash was totally a Redshirt.
you are clearly not a Real American as you used the subjunctive mood correctly
Uh, oh, Steve is going to the special hell, isn’t he?
In my day there was Grammar and Logic as well
David Cross and now Bob Odenkirk?
I have subscribed to your newsletter, sir.
I didn’t intentionally reunite Mr. Show in the past two posts, but I can’t say that I’m unhappy I did.
You mean this wasn’t written just for my benefit? UNSUBSCRIBE.
No…but yay! for happy coincidences.
The entire Ryan family is comprised of creative dynamos. Read what Steve Martin has to say about them:
I believe Congressman Ryan also creates little tiny hairs in his sink every morning. Well he first creates them out of his face then they migrate to the sink
Appropriate photo
I think we don’t need to criticize some one like this.