‘What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan? Lipstick’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Forget the bobblehead media villagers on the '"tee-vee" whose debate analysis focuses exclusively on optics and body language and presentation — because they are all just highly paid actors. They wouldn't know substantive policy arguments if they bit them in the ass, let alone be able to assess who is stating the facts, and who is just full-o-crap.

In reading through debate analysis from real journalists today, I discovered this gem from Charles Pierce at Esquire that is the best take down evah! VP Debate 2012: The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for America:

For the second time in as many presidential elections, Joseph
Biden got to debate a young, attractive Republican candidate who was
demonstrably less qualified to to be president than I am to be chairman
of the World Bank. Joseph Biden is a very lucky man. The Great Political
Matchmaker in the Sky keeps handing him people who are trying — and
failing — to fight above their weight class, and he keeps blowing
through what can now legitimately be called the Bum of the Quadrennium
Club.

There is a deeply held Beltway myth of Paul Ryan, Man of Big Ideas,
and it dies hard. But, if there is a just god in the universe, on
Thursday night, it died a bloody death, was hurled into a pit, doused
with quicklime, buried without ceremony, and the ground above it salted
and strewn with garlic so that it never rises again. On foreign policy,
Ryan occasionally rose, gasping, to the level of obvious neophyte. (He
was more lost in Afghanistan than the Russian army ever was.) On
domestic policy, his alleged wheelhouse, he was vague, untruthful, and
he walked right into a haymaker he should have seen coming from a mile
off, when he started bloviating about Biden's role in the "failed"
stimulus program, only to have Biden slap him around with Ryan's own
requests for stimulus money for his home district back in Wisconsin. He
also made it quite clear that a Romney-Ryan White House will do
everything it can to eliminate a woman's right to choose. This should
make for some fine television commercials over the next few weeks.

Moreover, the battering that Biden gave Ryan brought something into
sharp relief that the Republican party has been fudging ever since
Romney put the zombie-eyed granny-starver on the ticket — that, for his
entire political career up to that point, on critical economic issues,
Paul Ryan was an extremist even by the standards of the modern
Republican party, which are considerably high indeed. He was for full
privatization of Social Security. He was for the absolute elimination of
the defined-benefit Medicare and Medicaid programs. Since being
selected, it has become clear that the Romney people have forced him to
soften these positions. (His stance on Medicare, for example, has
evolved from Kill It Now to Arrange for Its Slow Death Later.) On
Thursday night, Biden dragged out the old Paul Ryan — and, I would
argue, the real Paul Ryan — and put him on display, and he made the new
Paul Ryan own him. For one brief moment, he almost got Ryan to commit to
Social Security privatization again. You could hear the screams from
Romney headquarters all the way up the Charles to where I was watching.

Ryan got hit on the stimulus. He looked ridiculous trying to defend his
refusal to specify what "loopholes" he and Romney plan to close to make
the magic arithmetic in their tax plan work; Raddatz treed him
completely on the mortgage-interest deduction, on the elimination of
which neither Ryan nor his running mate will commit to a position. He
looked even more ridiculous when Biden started pounding him on his
career-long quest to end Medicare and throw old people onto the tender
mercies of large insurance companies.

* * *

Wait. So if Paul Ryan gets his way, and Medicare as we know it gets
eviscerated in favor of a pot full of offal on which Paul Ryan has
slapped a label reading "Medicare," and my inadequate health-insurance
allowance comes by e-mail, then it's not a "voucher" because it wasn't a
check I got in the mail? And this is the issue on which Paul Ryan is
supposed to be Genius on roller skates. This was humiliating enough, but
when they started talking about war and peace, specifically in
Afghanistan, Ryan looked like a toddler trying to cross the Hindu Kush.

He stammered. He vanished into his syntax. He gave Biden the chance
to ask him if he preferred that American soldiers carry the fighting in
the worst parts of the country rather than Afghan troops, a devastating
comeback for which Ryan had no answer. He kept rambling about
maintaining the country's "credibility" until, if you closed your eyes,
he started to sound like Robert McNamara in 1965. And when Raddatz asked
him, deftly, what would be worse, another war in the Middle East or
Iran with a nuclear bomb, he leaped in precipitously with the latter,
while about 75 percent of the country, including the two other people on
stage with him, looked at Ryan as though he'd lost his mind. He did,
however, demonstrate a certain talent for pronouncing long foreign words
that his briefers had taught him on Tuesday. Also, he explained winter.

For years, Paul Ryan has been the shining champion of some really
terrible ideas, and of a dystopian vision of the political commonwealth
in which the poor starve and the elderly die ghastly, impoverished
deaths, while all the essential elements of a permanent American
oligarchy were put in place. This has garnered him loving notices from a
lot of people who should have known better. The ideas he could explain
were bad enough, but the profound ignorance he displayed on Thursday
night on a number of important questions, including when and where the
United States might wind up going to war next, and his blithe dismissal
of any demand that he be specific about where he and his running mate
are planning to take the country generally, was so positively terrifying
that it calls into question Romney's judgment for putting this
unqualified greenhorn on the ticket at all. Joe Biden laughed at him? Of
course, he did. The only other option was to hand him a participation
ribbon and take him to Burger King for lunch.

You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?

Lipstick.

The man knows how to write! Brilliant.