The Liberal Bias: Paul Ryan Represents All That Is Soulless And Wrong!

On Thursday, March 6, Paul Ryan and a few other big names of the Republican Party met at the Conservative Political Action Committee to rally the conservative base. Ryan, who may be popping up in the primary election, told a very special story that showed the other conservatives in the room just how out of touch my liberal friends can be.

It was a story that he had picked up from a cabinet member in Wisconsin. There was once a little boy who was offered a free lunch, but the boy didn’t want the free lunch because “he knew a kid with a brown paper bag had someone who cared for him.” Ryan went on to say that the people on the other side of the aisle follow a distorted set of values. “What the left is offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul,” Ryan said.

I almost do not even know where to start with this one. Let’s start with this idea that the kids who have a packed lunch have parents that care about them. I was a kid who didn’t have a packed lunch. I was fortunate enough to have money for the school lunch, but my main point is that this is in no way a legitimate argument to make. Assuming this story is true, then that means somewhere in Wisconsin is a boy who thinks that his parents don’t love him because he doesn’t have the same kind of lunch as the other kids. Is the real takeaway here to say that that child represents the ideal message of the right?

Ryan also implies that the parents of those children who get free lunches are not working. My parents didn’t pack my lunch because they were too busy working. I think it is actually more realistic to say that the kids with the packed lunch have a family where one parent isn’t working and has the time in the morning to see everyone off to school.

Ryan’s comments don’t really tell us what is wrong with the liberal side of things, but instead tells us more candidly what he thinks of the poor. They are poor because they don’t work and they don’t work because they choose not to. This isn’t the first time he’s helped spread this idea and he is in some very good company on this message because it is the anti-welfare argument of the right.

Ryan and really just about any republican candidate usually has that typical language that invokes Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” and they always seem to like to bring that out when they are in good company. We hear it every election cycle, almost constantly since Obama took office, about how the welfare system is broken and it offers no one a healthy way out of poverty. Ryan’s getting in his hits early this cycle, and I’m almost happy that he is.

I’m almost happy that he made this speech because it tells me one very important fact about Ryan and any republican that agrees with him. Paul Ryan believes, to some degree, that there is at least one single condition where a child living in poverty should go hungry and that this would be a positive thing.

This argument might sound like I’m taking his remarks to extremes, but consider that if you could ask him, “Mr. Ryan, do you think there is any possibility where letting a child go hungry would be a good thing?” and he said “No.” I can’t think of any better follow up question than to ask him if he still stood by his remarks at Thursday’s dinner and if he still stood by the underlying messages about the left that they implied.

One final remark: Paul Ryan may think it’s better to go hungry than accept a helping hand, but I believe that if we really are as great of a country as we say we are then a free lunch in a public school shouldn’t be something that only the “welfare kids” get. I think we should set a new standard.

Questions, comments, and what-have-you’s can be sent to csullery0@frostburg.edu