In August of 2012, when GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney stood in front of a battleship to announce his running mate would be Paul Ryan, he introduced the Wisconsin Congressman as the “intellectual leader†of the Republican Party.
But intellectualism is not highly-regarded — or well-defined — in many conservative circles, and so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Ryan last week was forced to apologize for “failing to verify the original source” of a story he quoted that turned out to be, well, essentially, made up.
The story was about a boy wanting his lunch in a brown paper bag, because the child equated a brown paper bag with a parent who made their child lunch. Ryan twisted an already twisted story to claim it meant children shouldn’t get free school lunches. It did not.
(The Washington Post’s Fact Checker and Wonkette did excellent research to get to the bottom of the baloney train.)
Now we have Paul Ryan citing a known White Nationalist to blame generations of “inner city” men for not working and passing that poor work ethic onto their sons.
Bill Bennett, the former Reagan Secretary of Education turned conservative pundit, spoke with Rep. Ryan this morning.
A clip of the conversation includes Ryan agreeing — “absolutely” — to Bennett’s statement:
“A boy has to see a man working, doesn’t he?”
Then the conversation continues, and Ryan cites Bennett’s “buddy,” Charles Murray, whom Think Progress’ Igor Volsky describes as “a conservative social scientist who believes African-Americans are, as a population, less intelligent than whites due to genetic differences and that poverty remains a national problem because ‘a lot of poor people are born lazy.'”
“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with,†Ryan told Bennett.
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http://videos.rawstory.com/video/Paul-Ryan-speaks-to-Bill-Bennet/player?layout=&read_more=1
Murray, who is a fellow at the highly-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is the co-author of Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which many believe to be racist because it suggests that African-Amerricans’ IQs are lower, because of genetics, than the IQs of whites.
The Southern Poverty Law Center writes:
According to Murray, disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior. Murray advocates the total elimination of the welfare state, affirmative action and the Department of Education, arguing that public policy cannot overcome the innate deficiencies that cause unequal social and educational outcomes.
If this is the backbone of Paul Ryan’s social and budgetary policy, then it makes perfect sense that he is seen as the “intellectual leader†of the Republican Party, right?
Hat Tip: The Raw Story
Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr
Previously:
VP Debate: Paul Ryan Lied 24 Times
Paul Ryan On DOMA: ‘Mitt And I’ Promise To ‘Protect Traditional Marriage’ In Court
Paul Ryan: Preventing Gay Marriage Part Of America’s ‘Universal Human Values’