Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Iconography


Paul Ryan, the leading light of economic wisdom on the right side of the aisle, warns us about the evils of Social Security. Accepting the fact that everyone without teabags blocking their vew recognizes his numbers don't add up, it turns out he could be a bit of a hypocrite, too.

One day as a 16 year old, Ryan came upon the lifeless body of his father. Paul Ryan, Sr. had died of a heart attack at age 55, leaving the Janesville Craig High School 10th grader, his three older brothers and sisters and his mother alone. It was Paul who told the family of his father’s death.

With his father’s passing, young Paul collected Social Security benefits until age 18, which he put away for college. To make ends meet, Paul’s mother returned to school to study interior design. His siblings were off at college. Ryan remembers this difficult time bringing him and his mother closer.

See how that worked? Congressman Paul Ryan loses his father at age 16, and Social Security steps up to ease the burden. Of course, his mother also received Social Security benefits as his father's surviving spouse.



And as long as we're deiconifying teabagger icons, how about Ayn Rand, the MatthewMarkLukeJohn of teabaggerism. Seems she was on the public dole, too (Thanks, Eugene):

Critics of Social Security and Medicare frequently invoke the words and ideals of author and philosopher Ayn Rand, one of the fiercest critics of federal insurance programs. But a little-known fact is that Ayn Rand herself collected Social Security. She may also have received Medicare benefits.

An interview recently surfaced that was conducted in 1998 by the Ayn Rand Institute with a social worker who says she helped Rand and her husband, Frank O’Connor, sign up for Social Security and Medicare in 1974.

Federal records obtained through a Freedom of Information act request confirm the Social Security benefits.
Thinking more deeply (which is what I do) it might not be all that inconsistent, after all: for what is teabaggerism if not a high-dudgeon if low-brow, a high-falutin' if low-handed way of justifying selfishness: "I got mine, I'll get more of mine. Screw you."

2 comments:

  1. Since the usual RWS seem to have nothing to say about Rand's hypocrisy inre. Social Security and Medicare - a few more tidbits about her and her putrid "philosophy".

    For her. altruism was the greatest possible evil.

    Like her acolyte, Limbaugh, she was hooked on drugs - Dexedrine, now known as speed. For weight control, years and years of "weight control".

    Disappointingly for RWS, she said: women had the right to choose an abortion.

    "Abortion is a moral right -- which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved..."

    "An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, but only to an actual being."

    "All laws against homosexual acts should be repealed..."

    Comically for RWS - She opposed Reagan and his "mixture of capitalism and religion," calling him "the representative of the worst kind of conservatism.

    She also thought immigration was a right - She made attempts to bring her parents and sisters to the United States.

    She hated just about everybody; she particularly hated weakness in any form, for example she publicly humiliated her husband for losing his memory, as he aged,saying how his "weakness", "sickened" her.

    This was a man who worshiped her to the point of allowing her to sleep with another man, twice a week, in his own bed.

    Does anybody need to know more about this "Conservative" icon?

    Read on!

    In her "novels she extolled the alpha male - like this creature:

    "The biggest role model she had for them (her hero's) was William Hickman, a serial killer whose biggest claim to fame was his kidnapping, torture, rape, and dismemberment of a 12 year old girl, who he then sewed back together to fool her father into leaving ransom money for her when he saw her corpse through a car window."

    "For Rand, who collected all his press clippings, he was a "genuinely beautiful soul" and a "superman" (that's what they called "alphas" back then.)"

    She said of him, "if he had had a (Objectivist?) goal, he could have trampled society underfoot.

    SeeIt@:
    http://www.rsdnation.com/node/150390

    Or, Google Ayn Rand hypocrisy.

    A six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket.

    This is the person Rand Paul and RWS point to as an inspiration.

    Does anybody need to know more about so-called "Conservatism"?

    Does anybody have any doubts about what "Conservatives" are preparing for us?

    EugeneInSanDiego

    ReplyDelete
  2. I first heard of Rand, as a young boy, traveling by Greyhound from Ohio to California.

    A young girl, perhaps 16, sat next to me and told me about a wonderful book she was reading - The Fountainhead - she said that when I was older, I had to read it.

    Eventually, I found a copy in a used book store; I was shocked by what I read.

    Today I learned that Rand was even more horrific than I thought. I did some more research today and the following was what I found.

    "She deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

    In her early notes for The Fountainhead: "One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself. Fine!" (Journals, p. 78.

    More, sickeningly more:

    Of The Fountainhead's hero, Howard Roark: He "has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world." (Journals, p. 93.)"

    In the original version of her first novel We the Living: "What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" (This declaration is made by the heroine Kira, Rand's stand-in; it is quoted in The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald Merrill, pp. 38 - 39

    Excerpts are from:

    Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman - by Michael Prescott

    SeeIt@
    http://www.michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm

    She was a monster, and her madness is still infecting new generations!

    EugeneInSanDiego

    ReplyDelete

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