Paul Ryan- Same as he ever was

Paul Krugman- The latest Paul Ryan budget is getting a lot of well-deserved flak, and so is Ryan himself. The combination of cruelty and raw dishonesty is so obvious, it’s hard to see how anyone can fail to see what’s going on.

But Ryan hasn’t changed; his budgets have always been like this, and so has he. Yet for years he was the darling of centrist pundits, who proclaimed him an “honest, open-minded, solution-oriented fiscal conservative.” What were they thinking?

The answer was that they wanted someone to fill that role; they knew, just knew, that there had to be people like that — because if there weren’t, if there weren’t any serious, honest conservatives with real influence, shrill people like me were actually right. And that couldn’t be true. So they invented a character called “Paul Ryan” who was what they wanted to see, but bore no resemblance to the real character with that name.

And while Ryan himself may have been devalued — although I’m not even sure of that — there will be others. Remember all the praise lavished on Chris Christie until Bridgegate broke? Again, it was easy to see what Christie was — but only, apparently, for those of us not committed to the belief that sensible moderates must exist in the GOP.

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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/same-as-he-ever-was-3/