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Wednesday, Apr 13, 2011 9:52 PM UTC

Paul Ryan’s bad day

The GOP's budget-cutting front man attacks Obama for being too partisan. Let's review the record...

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Topics: Paul Ryan, R-Wis., How the World Works, Barack Obama, Budget Showdown, Federal Deficit,

Paul Ryan's bad dayPaul Ryan

Paul Ryan is upset at Barack Obama. It’s not hard to understand why — the president slugged Ryan’s budget with a punch as hard as any he’s delivered to Republicans since getting elected. But who is Ryan trying to kid when he complains that the president wasn’t “building bridges but poisoning wells,” and that the speech was “excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate and hopelessly inadequate to addressing our country’s fiscal challenges”?

Excessively partisan? Compared to how Republicans have treated the president over the last two years, Obama’s harshest rhetoric hardly registers on the partisan scale. And Paul Ryan has been mixing it up with the best of them:

  • Paul Ryan called healthcare reform “a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.”
  • He openly rooted for “a failed presidency” as “the best outcome.”
  • He declared that the Democratic agenda “is completely antithetical to the American idea, the American project, and what America is about.”

And now he’s miffed because Obama had the temerity to point out that Ryan’s budget pays for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans by forcing seniors to pay more for their healthcare. I always thought Ayn Rand fans were made of tougher stuff.

Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

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