Mr Dogwhistle
by digby
How many times does Paul Ryan get to go on some right wing talk show and dogwhistle extremist crapola to his listeners and then walk it back for the village and get away with it?
After reading the transcript of yesterday morning’s interview, it is clear that I was inarticulate about the point I was trying to make. I was not implicating the culture of one community—but of society as a whole. We have allowed our society to isolate or quarantine the poor rather than integrate people into our communities. The predictable result has been multi-generational poverty and little opportunity. I also believe the government’s response has inadvertently created a poverty trap that builds barriers to work. A stable, good-paying job is the best bridge out of poverty.
The broader point I was trying to make is that we cannot settle for this status quo and that government and families have to do more and rethink our approach to fighting poverty. I have witnessed amazing people fighting against great odds with impressive success in poor communities. We can learn so much from them, and that is where this conversation should begin.
No, he wasn’t being “inarticulate” and his meaning was quite clear. We’ve been hearing this stuff from Republicans since Nixon’s Southern Strategy. There isn’t anyone in America who didn’t know what he was talking about when he said “inner city men” and the “culture of poverty.”
Ryan does this a lot. Recall his going before the Ayn Rand society and saying:
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand … Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism. And this to me is what matters the most: it is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or that the health care plan does not work, or this or that policy reason. It is the morality of what is occurring right now; and how it offends the morality of individuals working for their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed that is under attack.
And then getting away with this weasel when it was brought up in the presidential election and a bunch of evangelicals started paging through their Bibles for this “Ayn Rand” character:
“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.
The guy goes on Glenn Beck and says progressivism is a cancer (“exactly”) and then gets feted by Villagers for being a Very Serious “wonk”
I guess it must be those blue, blue eyes of his.
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