It’s not deficit reduction when you increase military spending so that you can make up for that by cutting Medicare and Medicaid. That’s not budget reduction. That’s ideology. That’s the right wing…The other great scam for Ryan is to say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to help the rich people…I’m going to lower their rates and get rid of loopholes,’ although he doesn’t mention a single loophole that he’ll get rid of…I agree with [Paul] Krugman’s analysis. There is this instinct to be in the middle. People don’t like to think of themselves as some way partisan. There are people who take comfort from the fact that, ‘Oh, I’ve got people on both sides who disagree with me.’ I think you see this in Tom Friedman. You see this in some others…Here’s the deal…They don’t want to consider themselves to be siding with the Democrats. It’s important for their self-image that they be seen as centrist. The problem is the Republican Party has given them fewer and fewer things that they can identify with, because they’ve moved so far to the right… So they have to find something they can support on the Republican side to maintain this self-image that they’re somehow independent of the parties. And so they pick up the Ryan budget.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) unleashed a stinging attack on House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan in an interview with TPM’s own Sahil Kapur. (via tpmmedia)

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This is a pretty complicated way of making it possible for Paul Krugman to relay his opinion that Tom Friedman is an idiot because the New York Times won’t let their entire staff just title all their articles “Tom Friedman is an idiot” but what the fuck, I’ll take it. Hooray. Kudos to everyone involved.

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