I was like many of us who were worried that President Obama wouldn't draw a big enough contrast between the two parties and their ideals when he was getting ready to give his budget-deficit speech yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised that he
April 14, 2011

I was like many of us who were worried that President Obama wouldn't draw a big enough contrast between the two parties and their ideals when he was getting ready to give his budget-deficit speech yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised that he did articulate some key differences for a change, including singling out Paul Ryan's junk-science pathway to the destruction of Medicare budget.

Paul Krugman has a good write-up, with many follow-ups to it. It was more of a political speech to me than anything else in my eyes. We do need to really get on our game more than everwhen we see things like this report coming from Democrats.

But the real treat for me was watching Krauthammer cry like a petulant child on Fox News.

His newly anointed conservative star, Paul Ryan, (Wall Street's BFF) was exposed as a fraud for putting out a plan that, first of all, wouldn't do anything to significantly reduce the deficit, but would make it a huge risk if you were lucky enough to live until your 60s. Growing old has gotten more dangerous with plans like his and Obama didn't hesitate to make that point clear.

Here's Charles totally losing his cool on Brett Baier's FOX Show:

Krauthammer: I thought it was a disgrace. I rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest, outside the last couple of weeks of a presidential election where you are allowed to call your opponent anything short of a traitor. But, we’re a year-and-a-half away from Election Day and it was supposed to be a speech about policy. He didn’t even get to his own alternative until more than halfway through the speech. And when he did, he threw out numbers suspended in mid-air with nothing under them with all kinds of goals and guidelines and triggers that mean nothing. The speech was really about and entirely an attack on the [Rep. Paul] Ryan plan.”

Charles then disingenuously compared tax rates and thought Ryan's plan wasn't so bad because his tax rates for corporations was 2% higher than Bowles-Simpson report which Ryan voted against. And then he pulled another whopper out of the ozone when he talked about the Bush tax cuts.

“I’m going to give you one example of how dishonest it was – he went on and on how the Republicans want to steal from your grandma to lower taxes on the rich,” Krauthammer continued. “And he talked about the Bush tax cuts and how much he is going to stand on the bridge and oppose any extension which is what he knows how to do. He has done it over and over for the last six years. The Ryan plan is not about the Bush tax cuts.

It transcends them. It’s what the deficit — what Obama’s own commission recommended, strip out loopholes and lower rates for everyone. It’s not about whether it’s the Bush rates or Clinton rates. It’s a whole new approach by which the Simpson-Bowles Commission recommended itself. In fact, Bowles had recommended in one of its scenarios of a high rate of 23 percent. Ryan is at 25 percent. Obama did this knowing that this is a way to play to his base. It was a speech that was quite remarkable in how demagogic it was and I say that with all due respect.”

Ryan's plan is nothing but tax cuts for the rich and Ryan is stealing from Grandma because, by turning Medicare into a voucher program, seniors would be forced to pay a tremendous amount of extra money that most working-class seniors wouldn't have to even pay for their health care, let alone having to then shop around and find some kind of a doctor-deal first. And on the medicaid front, a program that many seniors also have would be gutted with his block grant proposal because it does nothing for rising costs of health care and rations off the amount of care that could be given to medicaid recipients.

Ryan has now officially put the GOP on the defensive over Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security since Obama used his bully-pulpit to highlight these points. We can't depend on the beltway media to take a real hard look at his ludicrous ideas since they think it's bold even if it's ridiculous so the President has to do it and he did. John Boehner cosigned Ryan's plan yesterday as will every GOP presidential nominee moving forward, so they are stuck with it.

The optics of Ryan's plan reminds me of the Sennsenbrenner Bill, which turned the entire Latino community against Republicans. Obviously, hate-talk radio and Fox News personalities added fuel to the fire during the immigration bill under Bush as things moved forward. Latinos voted in strong numbers for George Bush in 2004, but were shocked by this piece of legislation and have turned against Republicans ever since. Will the same happen to seniors?

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