Medicare and Mediscares - "Yes, Paul Ryan...is a sore loser." (Krugman)

[jefferson_dem]

Medicare and Mediscares
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Yes, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, is a sore loser. Why do you ask?

To be sure, Mr. Ryan had reason to be upset after Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District. It’s a very conservative district, so much so that last year the Republican candidate took 76 percent of the vote. Yet on Tuesday, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, took the seat, with a campaign focused squarely on Mr. Ryan’s plan to dismantle Medicare and replace it with a voucher system.

How did Ms. Hochul pull off this upset? The Wisconsin congressman blamed Democrats’ willingness to “shamelessly distort and demagogue the issue, trying to scare seniors to win an election,” and he predicted that by November of next year “the American people are going to know they’ve been lied to.”

You can understand Mr. Ryan’s bitterness. He has, after all, experienced quite a comedown over the course of the past seven weeks. Until his Medicare plan was rolled out in early April he had spent months bathing in warm approbation from many pundits, who had decided to anoint him as an icon of fiscal responsibility. And the plan itself received rapturous praise in the first couple of days after its release.

<SNIP>

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&pagewanted=print

[obxhead]

1. “shamelessly distort and demagogue the issue, trying to scare seniors to win an election,”

Hmmm, I remember them doing the same thing with HCR and death panels.

The difference is that was a lie, and the truth is Ryan really does want to kill granny.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. gosh that's an old one 'scaring seniors!'

basically Repubs are dead meat if they mess with Medicare. Not a case of scaring. It would appear that many of the right have openly said and it is writing that they want get rid of Medicare.