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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"Paul Ryan Is the Newest New Nixon": Once again, Charles P. Pierce says all that needs saying.
Paul Ryan Is the Newest New Nixon, a Moocher BeliedBy Charles P. Pierce
Esquire
TAMPA, Fla. I think it was when he went to tears, one dab at each eye, while talking about his mother, that it became extraordinarily clear to me that there's a lot of old Dick Nixon in young Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Janesville, Wisconsin. It was always floating around the edges of my perception as I listened to his well-crafted, competently delivered, and virtually substance-free acceptance speech on Wednesday night. There was the crass connection to "the working men and women," like himself. The way his voice drops and his eyes glow when he starts talking about the America in which he grew up, where he flipped burgers and washed floors and dreamed very big dreams. There is the obvious effort to... connect, a gift for a simulacrum of empathy that is just inches away from actual sincerity, but which sells on the screen like someone who truly cares about you, his fellow struggling Americans. But it wasn't until he started tearing up that it all came together for me.
The difference, of course, is that Nixon was deeply, authentically marked by deep and authentic poverty and deprivation. He came by his ultimately self-destructive neuroses honestly. He earned every wound that he imagined the smart people of the world the Jews, those damn Kennedys had inflicted on him. He actually worked a job outside of government, and outside the Washington universe of government-dependent think tanks. He once actually had to earn a living. Paul Ryan hasn't lacked for a job since he left college as the golden child of Wisconsin Republican politics, riding his family connections into a job with then-Senator Bob Kasten.
When Paul Ryan is really working Nixon's side of the street, he talks about how his father died when he was a teenager, and about how his mother rode the bus to Madison, and he's trying to wring the same notes from the biographical tin-piano that Nixon could play like Van Cliburn. However, when Ryan turns the phrase, "I still live on the same block where I grew up," he doesn't mention that he happens to live in a 5,800-square-foot mansion that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. No good Republican cloth coats in the Ryan closet, that's for sure. Richard Nixon would have resented this upstart on sight, and not just for stealing his act. He'd have had Bob Haldeman on Ryan's ass by morning.
It was a good, solid debut for Ryan, who benefitted tremendously from a hall that had gone rapturous over an earlier speech by Condoleezza Rice, whose career as a studious non-politician came to a definitive end last night. (I say this in all sincerity: The woman has the finest diction of any public speaker I have heard anywhere. She may have been the last college student ever who paid attention in Public Speaking class.) Condi even had the considerable cheek to mention 9/11, the greatest national-security failure a national-security adviser ever had, right off the top. The house loved her, though, and she completely energized what had been a weird, disjointed ragbag of an evening full of speeches that went from an Old-Timer's Game John McCain, Mike Huckabee to a speechifying contest among the entire roster of vice-presidential runners-up. John Thune and Rob Portman showed why they didn't get the gig, and Tim Pawlenty told some really bad jokes and did everything but leave his resume on the podium for Willard Romney to pick up later. But it was Rice who put the charge in the place and gave Ryan something on which to build. Which he did, even though his performance was interrupted early on by protestors holding a banner reading, "Vagina: Can't Say It, Don't Legislate It." And shouting, "Health care, not warfare," and "My body, my choice." Frankly, it was about time somebody in the hall mentioned abortion.
The rest: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/paul-ryan-convention-speech-12188956
Laurian
(2,593 posts)He delivers very accurate assessments in a uniquely entertaining style. I love listening to him when he's on Stephanie Miller's show, too!
jsr
(7,712 posts)mojo2012
(290 posts)Well we all know what happened to Nixon... I'm sure Paul Ryan will love being linked to Nixon!!
malaise
(268,998 posts)Rec
BeyondGeography
(39,374 posts)Great writing, and very true. Ryan, OTOH, is just another entitled, utterly ungrateful product of Spoiled Brat Nation.
iandhr
(6,852 posts)Nixon founded the EPA and thought that every american should have access to healthcare.
Johonny
(20,851 posts)Nixon had a chance to go to Harvard and turned it down. People need to remember Nixon was intelligent and highly educated. Paul Ryan is your average college graduate. I'm not calling any college educated American stupid, but he's hardly the educational equal of Nixon or Obama. Frankly it shows in his sad budget leaflet if you bother to read it or his shallow understanding of almost any topic, even Atlas Shrugged
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)on a colossal scale. He had a massive inferiority complex because of his genuinely impoverished background, and over the years it grew into rabid jealousy and profound paranoia, both of which were primarily directed at the Kennedy family. It must be said that Nixon's failings were unique to him, and not a basic part of the programming of the Republican party at that time.
When Nixon was POTUS there was still a strong liberal wing of the Republican party and it was a real power center.
Nixon would have been an excellent Secretary of State in the administration of a president not burdened with the sort of baggage Nixon carried around.
hfojvt
(37,573 posts)I had to see how old he was (he's almost 60).
Heck, even a geezer like myself is struggling to remember Nixon. Who? Nixon? Wasn't he the Vice Presidential candidate in 1952, a year before Pierce was even born?
Now I wonder though, if most of the electorate is younger than me, or older than me.
Turns out to be kind of a tough call. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls.main/
In 2008, 47% was under 44 and 53% was over 45.
I still remember teaching in 1988 to college freshman. I was expecting them to remember Reaganomics from 1980. I mean, this was recent history that we all lived through. Right? Except that as people under 20, they were under 12 when the 1980 election happened, and most of them not paying much attention to it.
So much more is Nixon forgotten by people my age and younger.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)People have forgotten that, yes, presidents can lie and cheat and you have to be careful who you elect to office.
People had already forgotten that before Bush II's friends grabbed the White House for him.
If they had remembered, Bush II would not have had such an easy time when he moved in.
bobthedrummer
(26,083 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)WilliamPitt
(58,179 posts)WorseBeforeBetter
(11,441 posts)I will always read.
BlueStreak
(8,377 posts)... "the finest diction of any public speaker I have heard anywhere."
LOL
Talk about damning with faint praise. This is a classic.
JPZenger
(6,819 posts)stuffmatters
(2,574 posts)Love this piece by Pierce...one wonderful development of this hideously fact free/perverting Republican campaign is that Pierce has been widely quoted & many more of us have been lucky to discover him. I now check his blogs daily along with any Digby,
TBogg, Taibbi and Wolcott updates. These are painful times...and their humor as well as their analyses are precious.
It's great to compare Paul Ryan to Nixon and remind the world that serial lying is a methodology essential to both. What Ryan lacks in
neurotic motivation, he gains in commercial necessity...as he is first and foremost a Koch info pollution machine product and mouthpiece.
He's a professional moocher and liar. He even illegally couch surfs off the taxpayer...sleeping in his Congressional office and using the
Congress gym as his bathroom...no doubt taking his laundry home to wifey/mommy in the Janesville historic mansion.
His immaturity runs so deep that he does not even see this as illegal/dishonest/ but rather that it's his entitlement to
let the taxpayer pick up the tab for his utilities, lodging, cleaning. Certainly he never mentions it as additional income on his tax forms.
And, btw, we're now paying extra for those "non commie" lightbulb bills they voted to get back.
It's really pretty disgusting on so many clueless levels when you think of it.
HangOnKids
(4,291 posts)Professional moocher indeed!
burnsei sensei
(1,820 posts)that Richard M Nixon would never have done.
Nixon did NOT despise public assistance and the people on it.
Ryan does.
Nixon would NEVER have privatized Medicare or destroyed Medicaid.
Ryan will, either in the vice presidency or in any capacity he can.
Nixon was educated, and in spite of his fatal flaw, ambition, even wise.
Ryan is a self-centered fool.
Compare Paul Ryan and Richard Nixon?
There is no comparison.
There are only contrasts.
The Republican Party, as I wrote before, used to field good candidates.
Now all are vacant men committed to trash ideology.
Even if you are conservative, do not support these people.
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,001 posts)"Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."
-- H.L. Mencken