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Paul Ryan, speaking shortly after Ted Cruz, was very sad at CPAC that 2012 didn’t go “as planned”. That is, he and Mitt Romney lost in a rather embarrassing landslide. He is also afraid that Republicans are the villains in the Democrats’ morality play, a fear he expressed while trying to sell ending free school lunches.

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Ryan declared that discussing income inequality proves that Democrats are out of ideas:

Take the President. He released his budget this week. And from the looks of it, I’d say he’s doubling down—he’s going even further to the left. His teammates aren’t much better. You notice they all sound alike? All they talk about these days is income inequality. They say it shows party unity. But what it really shows is they’re out of ideas.

So, Democrats are “out of ideas” because they are pushing policies that benefit the people. Try not to weep for your country, especially because he was just getting warmed up.

See if you can chase this pearl under the shell:

The reason they keep talking about income inequality is because they can’t talk about economic growth.

That’s a shifty way of bad-mouthing policies that help people, sans facts. But of course, Paul Ryan doesn’t want to discuss actual policy. This is a guy who couldn’t do the math on his own budget, and couldn’t balance it. This is a guy whose budget caused the Nuns to protest publicly.

The real fear Republicans have of the current situation, which they have created by catering to corporate interests to such a degree as to be puppets for them, is that they are the villains in a morality play. So Ryan projected that Democrats would “run from their record” and make Republicans the villains:

They’re going to run from their record. They’re going to point fingers. And they’re going to try and make us the villain in their morality play.

Yes, Ryan is correct that they are the villains, but Republicans have cast themselves as the villains in this play. Blaming Democrats for this reality is just another way of avoiding taking responsibility for it.

To prove this point, Ryan told an anecdote about a young boy who didn’t want the free school lunch because a brown paper bag meant to him that someone cared for you. Ryan prefaced this story with the comforting thought, “What they’re offering people is a full stomach—and an empty soul. The American people want more than that.”

This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my friend Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. But he told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch—one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids’. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.

Ryan took this as a justification for ending school lunch programs, but never addressed how the young boy would learn at school with a starving tummy. He wants people to have the dignity to starve. They will have a full soul, according to him, but an empty stomach.

He said “That’s what the Left just doesn’t understand.” But the left understands Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (“A Theory of Human Motivation” ), and food comes before feelings. You have to meet your basic needs for survival before you can focus on anything else. The American people do want more than food, but they need food first. Ryan dishonestly skipped right past that fundamental physical need.

Showing just how disingenuous he needs to be in order to sell his corporate agenda to the masses, Ryan accused the “left” of loving Obamacare because it offers the “freedom” not to work:

And I’m optimistic about our chances—because the Left? The Left isn’t just out of ideas. It’s out of touch. Take Obamacare. We now know that this law will discourage millions of people from working. And the Left thinks this is a good thing. They say, “Hey, this is a new freedom—the freedom not to work.”

If Ryan really believes that the problem is that not enough people can find work, why does his party refuse to pass a jobs bill? The policies speak for themselves, and Democrats champion jobs bills that are then killed by Republicans who won’t even allow them to come up for a vote.

Obamacare is also not killing 2 million jobs, and the CBO never said that it was. But Ryan has never had an intimate relationship with honesty.

Getting called on acting like a villain as you champion starving children? That’s all someone else’s fault.