The always-predictable left is going absolutely nuts over Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan for the vice presidential slot. As she so often does, Maureen Dowd perfectly distills the hysteria and makes it her own:
I’d been wondering how long it would take Republicans to realize that Paul Ryan is their guy.
He’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in. He has a winning air of sad cheerfulness. He’s affable, clean cut and really cut, with the Irish altar-boy widow’s peak and droopy, winsome blue eyes and unashamed sentimentality.
Who better to rain misery upon the heads of millions of Americans?
He’s Scrooge disguised as a Pickwick, an ideologue disguised as a wonk. Not since Ronald Reagan tried to cut the budget by categorizing ketchup and relish as vegetables has the G.O.P. managed to find such an attractive vessel to mask harsh policies with a smiling face.
[. . .]
For the rest of us, at least, Ryan is not going to raise our hopes only to dash them. Unlike W., he’s not even going to make a feint at “compassionate conservatism.” Why bother with some silly scruple or toehold of conscience?
Unlike some of the right-wing ayatollahs, Ryan doesn’t threaten with moral and cultural gusts of sulfur. He seems more like a friendly guidance counselor who wants to teach us how to live, get us in shape, PowerPoint away the social safety net to make the less advantaged more self-reliant, as he makes the rich richer. Burning the village it takes to save it, so we can avoid the fiscal cliff, or as he and his fellow conservative Cassandras ominously call it, “the debt bomb.”
I recommend the entire article as an entertaining journey into liberal angst. They have only two cards to play against conservatives -- they're dumb or they're evil. We saw the dumb card played with a vengeance against Sarah Palin. That obviously won't fly against Ryan, so we're going to be bombarded with evil, evil, evil. Only rarely do we see the left actually try the dumb card and the evil card against the same person, Ronald Reagan being the most recent recipient. In case they try that again, remember how well it worked out last time.
Oh, and good riddance to "compassionate conservatism," the worst two-word phrase invented by a Republican since "revenue sharing."
