The Wunderkind Wizard of Washington

Paul Krugman tears Paul Ryan's "ludicrous and cruel" plan to little bitty shreds.

Once again, my comment was iced, so here it is:

Karen Garcia aptly labeled Paul Ryan and his plan Cheez Whiz, but I have another Whiz in mind -- the Wizard of Oz. Ryan has somehow managed to wrap into his persona the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion & the Tin Man.

The Scarecrow may be a stretch, for you have to assume that Ryan doesn't have a brain. If you take him at his word -- that he really believes he has devised a great plan that will be good for the country -- then he is the Scarecrow. As Krugman and other analysts have illustrated these past few days, Ryan's numbers, especially those based on Heritage Foundation projections, are unbelievable. Ryan isn't above contradicting himself, either -- accepting some CBO numbers while rejecting others. So if you believe Paul Ryan is an honorable man, you have to assume he doesn't have a brain -- like Frank Baum's Scarecrow.

The Cowardly Lion is an easy one. Even in this newspaper, columnists have been calling Ryan "courageous" and "brave." If Ryan were courageous, he would have told the truth when he rolled out his plan. Instead, he concentrated only on the spending cuts in his roll-out video with its charts and graphs. Had he even mentioned the big ole tax cut part -- which the cowardly Mr. Ryan did not -- he would have completely undermined his argument that these humungous cuts in essential services were necessitated by the deficit. You just can't say in the same breath you are going to cut programs for the neediest Americans and cut taxes (to below the middle-class tax rate) for the richest Americans without somebody catching on. Ryan roars, all right, but he is a Cowardly Lion. He doesn't dare tell the truth about his own program.

And the Tin Man? The Tin Man -- just like Paul Ryan -- lacked a heart. I don't know what has made Mr. Ryan so craven, but perhaps he thinks of each of us as just a number. (Probably shouldn't be the Social Security number -- deep in his heart, Ryan wants to gut Social Security, too, but he's saving that part of his plan for another day.) If Ryan thought of us as living, breathing people rather than as abstract numbers, he would have to think of the people under age 55 whose retirements he plans to decimate. He would have to think of the disabled people he will leave to fend for themselves. He would have to think of the poor, sick people who would not be able to get medical help until it was perhaps too late. He'd have to think of the deserving students who couldn't get low-interest financial aid for college. If Ryan had a heart, he couldn't sleep at night. He couldn't look at himself in the mirror. So I can only conclude he isn't sleeping, doesn't have a mirror -- or, more than likely, he doesn't have a heart. He's the Tin Man.

In Baum's story, it turns out the Scarecrow really had a brain, the Cowardly Lion really had courage all along & the Tin Man did indeed have a heart. But real life isn't as neat as fiction. In real life, we got Paul Ryan, a man devoid of those characteristics that define us as honorable women and men.

Wunderkind? I'm not sure Ryan even qualifies as humankind.