Neocon House Speaker Paul Ryan

Ryan and likeminded Republican and Democrat neocons infesting Congress want these vital programs ended—to assure unrestricted military spending as well as sustained handouts to Wall Street and other corporate favorites.

Read the entire article

The Creaming of Paul Ryan

In the first exchange of the presidential election season over foreign policy issues, the neocons — in the person of GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan — got creamed. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Ryan got creamed by Joe Biden — who serves in an administration that is pursuing each and every one of the neocons’ policy goals, and doing a much better job of it than George W. Bush ever did.

Ah, but these days we must take our pleasures where we find them, and who can deny it was fun watching the amateurish Ryan stammer as he tried to remember the talking points the neocons had drilled him on. One fully expected his ears to start fluttering and helicopter him outta there. Martha Raddatz, a respected reporter who specializes in the Middle East, moderated and her first question was about Libya: wasn’t this a “massive intelligence failure” on the part of the administration?

Read the entire article

Paul Ryan, Randian? No, just another neocon

Rand would regard our current government as an unjust, rights-violating, bloated monstrosity. It is a monster Paul Ryan helped create. Ryan may admire Ayn Rand. He may quote F. A. Hayek in interviews. Yet his voting record is right out of the neocon playbook.

Rand opposed government bailouts and subsidies. Yaron Brooks, director the Ayn Rand Institute, said the bailouts were “national socialism of the financial markets.” In contrast, Ryan voted for the bank bailouts. He broke with party leadership and the majority of his fellow republicans by voting for the auto bailouts. He supported TARP.

Paul Ryan: Realist or Neocon?

The issue of Paul Ryan's foreign-policy views is starting to attract some attention among the pundit class. Andrew Sullivan asked yesterday, "Is Paul Ryan A Neocon?" It's a fair question. Whether it is a difficult one to answer is another matter.

To be sure, Ryan does not have any real foreign-policy record. But reasonable inferences can be made from several of his statements. Brett Stephens, for example, devoted his Wall Street Journal column yesterday to suggesting that Ryan issued nothing less than a "neocon manifesto" in a speech to the Alexander Hamilton Society. He noted that Ryan declared that a belief in "universal rights" leads inevitably to the rejection of what he termed "moral relativism." Ryan added, "It causes you to recoil at the idea of persistent moral indifference toward any nation that stifles and denies liberty, no matter how friendly and accommodating its rulers are to American interests." It would be interesting to know exactly which society Ryan is alluding to—what right-wing or left-wing authoritarian country is "accommodating" itself to American interests? Does Ryan mean Pakistan—a grudging ally at best? Egypt? Or Saudi Arabia?

PAUL RYAN: MORE OF THE SAME

It has happened again. We go through this every four years, and every four years the vast majority of “conservatives” fall for it. This is such a broken record. What did Forrest Gump say: “Stupid is as stupid does”? And wasn’t it P.T. Barnum who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”? Well, here we go again.

Neocon RINO George H.W. Bush picks “conservative” Dan Quayle. “Conservative” G.W. Bush picks neocon RINO Dick Cheney. Neocon RINO John McCain picks “conservative” Sarah Palin. Now, neocon RINO Mitt Romney picks “conservative” Paul Ryan. As long as there is one “conservative” on the ticket, mushy-headed “conservatives” across the country will go into a gaga, starry-eyed, hypnotic trance in support of the Republican ticket. I’m convinced that if Lucifer, himself, was the GOP Presidential candidate, he would get the support of the Religious Right and Republican “conservatives” as long as he selected a reputed “conservative” to join his ticket. And, by the way, the notable “conservative” wouldn’t think twice about joining such a ticket, either, I’m convinced.

Paul Ryan is Another Big Government Neocon

While conservatives are fired up about the selection of Paul Ryan for VP, primarily because of Romney’s lackluster campaign, I don’t share their enthusiasm. Paul Ryan is another big government neocon. Conservatives are fooling themselves to think otherwise.

I started to call this post, Paul Ryan is Another Big Government Phony, but that’s not correct. He’s openly advocating that his principles really don’t mean anything to him. It’s the conservatives who support him that are the phonies because they make excuses for the stupid things that he does.

One need only look at Ryan’s speech on the House floor in support of the TARP bailout to see that this guy is just another big government neocon.

Stephens: Paul Ryan's Neocon Manifesto

Last summer, the chairman of the House Budget Committee made a foray into foreign-policy land with a speech to the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington, D.C. About 100 people showed up, and it got next to no coverage. That should now change—and not just because Paul Ryan's views on America's role in the world are no longer a matter of one Wisconsin congressman talking.

Here, in CliffsNotes form, is what the speech tells us about Mr. Ryan. First, that he's an internationalist of the old school; in another day, he would have sat comfortably in the cabinets of Harry Truman, ...

Is Paul Ryan A Neocon?

Over past few months, Ryan has quietly been receiving foreign policy/national sec briefings from Elliott Abrams, Kim & Fred Kagan & others

Max Fisher reviews Ryan's foreign policy record:

Articles about Paul Ryan's foreign policy experience tend to be short, and to mostly talk about anything but. The Wisconsin congressman and now Republican vice presidential candidate has long focused on domestic policy, particularly social programs and the budget. Like Romney, he has little to no record on foreign policy or national security. Oft-quoted political analyst Larry Sabato called him "just a generic Republican on foreign policy" who, also like Romney, has tended to follow the party's lead. His one foreign policy issue seems to be overturning the Cuba embargo, the sort of thing that appeals to foreign policy dorks (like me) but does poorly among the GOP establishment and swing Florida voters, meaning that we will probably not hear much about it during the campaign.

Romney Still a Predictable Neocon

As for neoconservatives and “the base,” I have to protest. Romney didn’t include neoconservatives on his foreign policy team to keep “that part of the base happy.” They aren’t part of “the base.” Neoconservatives are almost entirely movement and party elites, and they are the ones Romney was trying to satisfy. They have little or no representation at the rank-and-file level. If he didn’t have Robert Kagan and the like on his foreign policy team, 90% of Republican voters wouldn’t even notice, but neoconservative activists and pundits in Washington would. His choice of advisers is a statement about how he intends to govern, and the advisers he appears to listen to most often are among the most hawkish. I’m not sure that the Zoellick appointment even qualifies as throwing realists a (very small) bone, since there are indications that no thought was given to the policy implications of the choice. Realists are treating the appointment as a signal that Romney is sending out, but apparently it wasn’t intended as a signal and it doesn’t say anything about the content of Romney’s future foreign policy.

The Marketing of Paul Ryan

Ryan may be a neocon drone, but he’s no Dan Quayle: he realizes, as he put it in his talk to the Hamiltonians, that “our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”

Translation: we can’t have an empire, given our present financial straits. So what’s the solution? To any normal American, who never wanted an empire to begin with, the answer is simple: give up the imperial pretensions to “global leadership,” and tend to our own ill-used and leached-out garden. Ryan, however, is a creature of Washington, and this is unthinkable inside the Beltway: it would be a most grievous blow to the self-esteem of these worthies if they had to exchange the imperial purple for a plain republican cloth coat. Why, no Serious Person would even suggest such a thing! So instead of stating the facts, he makes up some of his own: