Is Paul Ryan a Democrat Operative?

By all accounts, Republicans were set up for a wave election this November. As of this writing, Real Clear Politics predicts Republicans win 47 Senate seats to 46 for Democrats, 24 governorships to 18, and 232 House seats to 187. The rest are toss-ups. Famed statistical prognosticator Nate Silver predicts Republicans will pick up six seats and win the Senate. Panicked Democrats are ceding the House in an attempt to save the Senate.

President Obama’s approval rating sits at 42 percent and Democrats are running from him like rats fleeing a sinking ship. But the worst issue for Democrats right now is Obamacare. Politico reports even after Obama gloated about his phony 7.1 million sign-up milestone, Democrats are still running from it, “Vulnerable incumbents who voted for the Affordable Care Act but have distanced themselves have no plans to suddenly embrace it. They plan to continue emphasizing the ways they want to ‘fix it’ and ‘make it work.’”

If Democrats wanted to get it right, if they could get it right, they could have done so the first time. No Republicans voted for Obamacare. They have nobody to blame. Like every other socialist policy, there’s no fixing Obamacare. The problem is inherent in socialism, not the policy implementation. Fortunately, most Americans realize that about Obamacare. Too bad they don’t realize it for all socialist programs.

So despite Obama’s duplicity - he won’t tell us how many people actually paid for Obamacare, how many of those were uninsured previously, or how many of those are the young, healthy people necessary to subsidize the costs for older, less healthy people before the election - things looked rosy for Republicans.

The Republican establishment has also battered and broken the Tea Party. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s boasts in The Washington Times, “‘I think we are going to crush them everywhere,’ he said, The New York Times reported, ‘I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.’” McConnell faces a Tea Party primary challenge, so maybe this is wishful thinking, but I doubt it.

Enter Paul Ryan. With everything going Republicans’ way, Ryan promoted a nakedly political budget, taking the focus off Obamacare and giving Obama - the greatest demagogue of my lifetime - red meat to attack.

The New York Times notes the political nature of Ryan’s budget, “Mr. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman and a possible White House contender in 2016, laid out a budget plan that cuts $5 trillion in spending over the next decade. He said it would bring federal spending and taxes into balance by 2024, through steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, and the total repeal of the Affordable Care Act just as millions are reaping the benefits of the law.”

Ryan targets only programs overwhelmingly favored by Democrats, and his cuts, besides Obamacare, are phony, actually reductions in increases. The Demagogue-in-Chief called Ryan’s budget a stink-burger to great fanfare.

Tea Party activists saw through Ryan’s gimmick too. Breitbart News quotes one critic, “Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, told Breitbart News it is fitting that Ryan released his budget on April Fool's Day. ‘On this day when we celebrate fools, we are once again presented with a budget by Republicans and asked to believe it is something more than a political document,’ Cunningham said.”

Another critic exposes the budget for increasing spending for two years before beginning reductions, “Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, told Breitbart News ‘Ryan's budget should be found in the book store in the fiction department. If there is one thing we know about Washington, increased spending now with the promises of spending cuts in the future means we will get the spending but never the cuts.’”

Breitbart continues, “‘The sad fact is that the promised reductions never come,’ [Mark Kevin] Lloyd said. ‘Future congresses are not bound by the dreams, schemes, and chicanery of previous congresses. These people think the American people are stupid, and the fact that we keep letting them get away with it makes me believe they might be right.’”

In midterm elections the party that controls the White House generally has trouble turning out their voters, but voters for the opposition party come out strong. With Obamacare and Obama both so unpopular, that’s how 2014 was shaping up. Ryan’s budget turns that upside-down by energizing Democrat voters and chilling Republican excitement. Obama’s approval rating will increase as he attacks Ryan’s budget.

Ryan is no fool. He’s a long-time member of House Speaker Boehner’s ruling elite from a moderate district in the liberal state of Wisconsin. He’s about to become Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He and Boehner knew the political consequences of releasing that budget.

Ryan’s budget shows the Republican and Democrat divide is fake. The real divide is between ruling predators and us, their prey. No predator wants its food supply reduced. Republican and Democrat partners rule us more thoroughly through divide and conquer than any invading army ever could.