-By Warner Todd Huston
The left is desperate to color Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s GOP budget plan (The Path to Prosperity, as it is styled) as the end of America, crazed to call his plan a killer of old people, and maniacal about saying that the GOP and Ryan want to destroy the country by asking for a few budget cuts. The left even claims that “the country” or “the people” are against the GOP budget proposal. But even lefty blogger Dave Weigel is asking the seminal question: where are the protests?
Now, there does seem to be enough evidence that the people are not very optimistic about America’s economic outlook. And members of Congress are certainly feeling the heat over the budget. I recently spoke to GOP Chief Deputy Whip Rep. Peter Roskam and he confirms that. So, the American people are exercised about the budget. They just aren’t mad about the Ryan plan.
The fact seems to be that the Democrat’s are losing the issue and all their demagoguery against Ryan — led by the chief demagogue in the White House — are not winning the American people over to their side by trying to make Paul Ryan out to be an ogre.
Amusingly, the left sees “the people” against Ryan’s budget because the tiny number of union thugs left in the country hate it. They are blinded by the bubble in which they live.
Back to Weigel’s piece, he notes that when last the country was incensed about budgets and congressional overreach there were hundreds of raucous townhalls with many a bedeviled congressman left holding his hat and looking perplexed as his constituents screamed bloody murder at him on his trip back home. That was in 2008 and 2009 when the Obamacare debacle was fresh and the Tea Party was in its infancy.
Weigel cogently notes that if the left is right and “the people” hate the GOP’s and Ryan’s plan, then where are all the raucous townhalls? Where are the thousands of Democrats and left-wingers going crazy in protests and confrontations with their congressmen back home?
Well, the fact is such demonstrations of the ire of “the people” are practically non-existent.
Weigel notes that the budget battle and the hate Democrats are spewing at Ryan seems to be grease for the lefty blogs and extremist, left-wing advocacy groups of course. But it seems pretty clear that with all the arm waving these far left groups are doing none of it is resonating with the American people.
We can conclude that, at least up to this point, the Ryan budget does not elicit the fear, distrust, and outright hatred that Obamacare raised. This is a clear sign that so far the GOP is winning this battle.
And now to do the visual equivalent of name dropping…
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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