Bill Maher on Paul Ryan’s Budget BS
Coming up in the new issue of Rolling Stone: an interview with the great Bill Maher, who opens up on politics, patriotism, and pot (and much more) with contributing editor Tim Dickinson. Given the budget shenanigans going on right now, we thought we’d share this snippet from the extended transcript, where the Real Time host unloads on Republican congressman Paul Ryan and his much-hyped budget plan:
It’s a fantasy document, it’s never going to happen. If you’re going to put out a fantasy document that appeals to the dickishness in your base, shouldn’t it at least accomplish the goal? But it doesn’t, it doesn’t come close to solving the deficit or the debt. It says it right in the document. He said it today, “It’s not a budget, it’s a cause,” which should be flagged right away by the Democrats as being the wrong way to look at this. No, it’s not a cause, it is a budget, that’s how we should look at it and it’s how we should solve these things. But the problem is that we don’t have one party that stands up to the other side, we have two parties who are agreeing that we should cut from the EPA and people who do the inspections of food and Pell grants and home heating oil for the poor, and nobody is standing up and saying, “No, we should take it from the defense department, from foreign subsidies, from tax cuts for the rich, for corporations like GE that paid no taxes last year.” That’s what’s wrong with our political system.
It irks me to no end that people keep calling him ‘courageous,’ the way the media never really looks into anything very deeply, they hear a buzzword, like ‘courageous’ attached to Paul Ryan, and now it’s conventional wisdom that Paul Ryan is courageous. Really? Courageous would have been going after defense and farm subsidies and corporations and rich people. His budget doesn’t do any of that, it goes after children, the poor, the jobless, the people who had the least and could least defend themselves, who had no lobbyists, this is courageous? This is picking on the weakest, smallest kid on the playground and getting called courageous for it.