The very mis-directed Paul Ryan---and his Republican Party

There is an article out just now, from The New York Times, pointing out the problems, inconsistencies and heartless hypocrisies, even, of Republican member of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan. The thing about it is, in the bigger picture, it also points out the callousness and even immorality and lack of "Christian values" of the entire Republican Party:

Paul Ryan's Irish Amnesia

"And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs. But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.

The Irish historian John Kelly, who wrote a book on the great famine, was the first to pick up on these echoes of the past during the 2012 presidential campaign. “Ryan’s high-profile economic philosophy,” he wrote then, “is the very same one that hurt, not helped, his forebears during the famine — and hurt them badly.”

What was a tired and untrue trope back then is a tired and untrue trope now. What was a distortion of human nature back then is a distortion now. And what was a misread of history then is a misread now. Ryan boasts of the Gaelic half of his ancestry, on his father’s side. “I come from Irish peasants who came over during the potato famine,” he said last year during a forum on immigration.

BUT with a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand, he apparently never did any reading about the times that prompted his ancestors to sail away from the suffering sod. Centuries of British rule that attempted to strip the Irish of their language, their religion and their land had produced a wretched peasant class, subsisting on potatoes. When blight wiped out the potatoes, at least a million Irish died — one in eight people." 

And the crazy thing, the really crazy thing about all this is that neither Paul Ryan nor anyone in the Right Wing or Republican Party have enough awareness or education or intelligence or sensitivity to see or realize the heartlessness, the lack of humanity, the callousness or the total, utter lack of "Christian values" and/or morality their policies take them.

And the nation.