Willard Picks A Veep

And it's another doozie

From Greg Sargent, WaPo:

The Ryan pick is also a break with Romney’s previous theory of the race. He had previously intended to make the campaign about nothing more than a referendum on the economy and Obama’s stewardship of it. Now it will be a choice between two starkly different ideological visions, one that drags the race onto the turf of tax fairness and entitlements — which is much more in line with the debate Dems wanted.

The press is already accurately framing the pick as a clash of visions. But what’s more important is that Ryan’s vision remains vague. We still don’t know in any meaningful detail how he would achieve the deep cuts necessary to make that vision work.

Which raises a question: How aggressively will the news media scrutinize the true substantive nature of his vision? The press has done a great job pinning Romney down on the real implications of his tax plan, largely thanks to that unsparing Tax Policy Center study. Ryan, by contrast, has been widely accorded the presumption of fiscal “seriousness," mainly because he looks so earnest and genuinely despairing in those videos that show him stalking the halls of Congress in the grip of existential deficit angst.

Choosing Paul Ryan tells me Romney and the GOP intend to concentrate on changing Government.  The emphasis will be on changing how we finance the thing, but this is all about "starving the beast" and then "drowning the government in a bathtub" blah blah blah.

The point of the exercise is to move us in a direction that is fundamentally different from the Representative Democracy we've been trying so hard to pretend hasn't been slipping away from us for 30 years.  These guys believe strongly that "the will of the people" is all well and good when you're talking about Abortion and Gay Marriage and Gun Laws and all the other stuff that floats around the edges, but not when it comes to making the decisions that really matter.  Romney is another Silver Spoon Legacy fuck who insists that "The Ruling Class must be maintained to assure a smooth-functioning society".  That's how guys like him think because that's who guys like him were brought up, and that's how guys like him are further conditioned to behave when they get into politics.

So I think it all comes down to Privatization.  They picked Ryan because these boneheads actually think this is an idea whose time has come, and Ryan's "budget plan" is how they think they can force feed it to us.  Forget the simple fact that Government-as-Private-Enterprise is exactly what the American Revolution was all about  (maybe that's why The Right Radicals have been pounding on US History to the point that it's completely bent outa shape).  And maybe that's why they've been harpin' on American Exceptionalism so loudly - if we see the scheme for what it is, they need some of us to be conditioned enough to think "yeah, it was a bad way to go in every other country and in every other time, but hey, we can do it right in America 'cuz we're the exception".

Obama's bad enough, but at least with Obama, we've got a shot at making the thing more about people and not just the fucking numbers all the fucking time  - Romney/Ryan is another GOP-sponsored disaster looking for a place to happen.