The New York Times Anti-Ryan Campaign

The Worst St. Patricks Day Article You’ll Read All Year: How Paul Ryan is Like Genocidal Englishmen

We may have to reserve judgement on the worst article we’ll read all year. It’s still early! Though other lazy NYT op-ed writers have nine more months of blindfolded typing to catch up with him, Tim Egan is definitely a contender.

First, Krugman’s jaw-dropping, quote-worthy Paul Ryan smear, now Reason‘s Nick Gillespie has to clean up after Tim Egan’s smug, lazy historical association flim-flam. Both Krugman and Egan employ the same tactic, see if you can notice the identical device, disclaiming responsibility for responsibility via a weasel-worded disclaimer.

Nick Gillespie writes:

In Sunday’s New York Times, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Timothy Egan likens Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to the English overlords of Ireland’s great potato famine of 1845-1852. Seriously.

Egan says he did a bit of “time traveling” in anticipation of St. Patrick’s Day (whose celebration in the form of parades and drunkeness is largely an invention of colonial America). What did Egan find while traipsing about in the Old Sod?

“A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan…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.”

But wait, before you dare say that Egan in any way means to compare Ryan to the architects of one of the most heinous acts of imperial brutality, perish the thought:

“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.”

You got that? “There is no comparison” between “de facto genocide” and Paul Ryan’s call for, what, trimming (not eliminating, mind you) future increases in food stamps? And yet, that’s exactly the point of Egan’s article – to put Ryan’s mug cheek-to-jowl with the 19th-century malefactors who controlled the food supply of Ireland and did little or nothing as the race of kings died like flies. All while mumbling that “there is no comparison, of course.”

There’s a “lazy-day hammock” going on in all of this, and it has nothing to do with Paul Ryan having “a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand.” It’s got a helluva lot more to do with Timothy Egan’s (and by extension, The New York Times‘) willingness to entertain any useless and un-illuminating comparison as long as it slags the right villain.

Paul Ryan’s ritual invocation of his Hibernian roots is indeed every bit as grating to me as the howl of the banshee at the end of Darby O’Gill and the Little People. And it is sweet music to my ears compared to the underhanded and rotten sort of song Egan is singing…Read the rest…

Nick Gillespe – Reason.com

Related articles

• The left’s attempt to co-opt Irishness (and St. Patrick’s Day) (dailycaller.com)
• Irish amnesia (susiemadrak.com)
• Paul Ryan’s Famine Rhetoric (theweek.com)
• In Defense of Paul Ryan (nationalreview.com)
• Paul Ryan Claims Black Men Are Lazy And The Cause Of Poverty In This Country (mahustlerszone.wordpress.com)
• Paul Ryan And His Irish Amnesia (crooksandliars.com)