Mitt Romney no longer cares who knows it: he’s the rich man’s champion, the might-is-right prophet, the standard bearer for the Ayn Rand generation of every man for himself and the Devil take the stragglers.
He stands before America today draped in Paul Ryan’s budget, a diabolical blueprint of oppresion and despair, a master plan for America that would end Medicare, shred the social safety net, shower tax breaks upon the wealthy and savage the old, the sick and the poor.
By choosing Ryan as his runnng mate, Romney has sold out to the most extreme elements in his party. He is renouncing any claim to moderation or humanity, and kicking the old Romney – that wishy-washy governor of Massachusetts – under the bus.
And he is spitting in the face of the “lower classes”. He is telling us to do our worst, to scream our loudest, to kick and rant, he doesn’t give a damn. He’s got the money, see? He’s got the clout. He’s got the skilled professionals who will flood the airwaves with his propaganda until we think black is white and up is down.
Meanwhile, the Republican machine is grinding away at democracy throughout the nation, suppressing the voting rights of minorities and the poor, gerrymandering voting districts, stacking the deck in every way they can to pave the way for a Romney-Ryan victory in November. Of course it isn’t fair. And of course they don’t care. They’re Republicans, remember?
And, perhaps even more desructive, to divide and rule us, they will exploit every hot-button issue from abortion and contraception to “welfare queens” and racism.
Romney doesn’t much care about any of that, of course. His agenda is economic; he wants to make rich people like himself richer and more powerful, that’s all.
But Ryan is no pragmatist; he is an apostle of evil. He professes to be a Roman Catholic but true Catholics like the “nuns on a the bus” have rejected his “faith” as heresy. Ryan is not a Christian by any plausible definition; he is the avenging angel of the angry elite – money married to money, privilege demanding more privilege as a God-given right.
Here’s how Jonathan Chait summed up the Ryan plan in the New Republic:
Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan’s moral philosophy:
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” …
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand’s writings when he told his audience that, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill … is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict–individualism versus collectivism.”
The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.
By linking himself to the Ryan budget, Romney has shed his sheep’s clothing, and stands vefore the world as the wolf he has chosen to be. His days of shilly-shallying and flip-flopping are over. He can dodge and weave all he wants now but everyone can see him for what he is – not just a soulless corporate raider but a tyrant and a bully.
Click here to read about the Ryan budget.
