Congressman Paul Ryan, show me the real numbers or are you just not that smart?

Leading up to Thursday’s night’s vice president debate people on every network described Congressman Paul Ryan as “one of the smart ones.”

What the hell does that mean?

I’ve been trying to figure that out for more than a year and about the only reason he’s called “one of the smart ones” is he put forth that “Ryan Budget” the eliminates all humanity from federal spending. OK, that’s a little over the top. It doesn’t eliminate  all humanity, we’ll get a voucher to try and buy some on the open market.

So, this debate between Congressman Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden was going to be an eye opener. Congressman Ryan, the guy from Wisconsin – the state of my birth, was going to wow my pants off and I might conclude, “He’s a smart guy.”

But here it is, the debate is in its closing remarks and I’m wondering, “where’s the beef?”

Yeah, he’s a smart guy, for a congressman. He knows how to speak well and he’s far more knowledgeable about all the issues than Sarah Palin, and by her benchmark, such as it is, Ryan really is a smart guy, by leaps and bounds. He’s the kind of guy you’d want as your running mate, if you were Mitt Romney.

Ryan can spew out numbers all right, some of them are even accurate, like the percentage of Americans living in poverty, but the numbers we’ve been waiting to hear, like how you balance a budget while cutting taxes and increasing the defense budget by a trillion dollars, we didn’t get any of those numbers. As he and his running mate have done throughout the campaign, he avoided giving up any details.

Ryan set the tone of the debate right away. Moderator Martha Raddatz started the debate with a question about the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya. In his response Ryan went straight to the political attack, talking about some kind of White House-State Department conspiracy that got an ambassador and three other Americans killed.

That’s when the smile, smirk if you will, began to spread across the vice president’s face.

“Is that all you got,” Biden said with that look. And the two went at it. This was “the Thrillah in Manila” all over again, or as the Danville, KY natives put it: “The Thrill in the Ville II.” And that’s after we watched the “Rope a Dope” debate between Obama and Romney.

In 2000 vice presidential candidates Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney debated in the same place.

The gloves were off and F’in’ A, they went at it. Both talked over each other, interrupted each other and otherwise threw their verbal punches and groin kicks at will. The moderator is known as a great journalist, but at times she was little more than a referee. “Briefly Mr. Vice President. I want to move on to another subject.”

Then, just as she’s stating the new question, Smokin’ Joe Biden throws another jab about how wrong the Romney-Ryan ticket is and then smiles as he lets Martha Raddatz finish her question. That’s the Scranton way.

Compared to last week’s debate between the presidential candidates, the debate Thursday Night bare knuckles street fight with bookies across the pond taking the bets.

Actually, if you can hide it from the government, you can bet on the remaining debates as well as the elections. Right now the bookies give President Obama a 75 percent chance of being re-elected.

It wasn’t all bare-knuckle style last night. Both candidates got into substance and in most cases Ryan was in over his head an incapable of keeping up with the Democrats. He had to admit that while he was denouncing Obama’s stimulus package of 2009 he was also writing the Energy Department for stimulus money for two of his constituents.

None of the commentators mentioned this last night, but Ryan gave his  idol, Ayn Rand, a shout out of sorts when he zipped off this well-rehearsed line: “There aren’t enough rich people and small businesses to tax to pay for all their spending.”

That’s the heart of John Galt’s gripe about government and the working class. According to the Randites, the poor, hard working rich people are getting picked on by government and all the takers the government supports — the 47 percent, according to Governor Romney. They work hard (don’t they?) and make all these trillions of dollars and the goddamn government comes by and takes it away from the producers of the nation and gives it to those  moochers!

Just an aside: the movie Atlas Shrugged opens today around the country. Will it have an effect on the campaign? We’ll see.

The best part of the debate for the Democrats came on foreign affairs. Biden pinned Ryan to the wall at every opportunity, pushing Ryan to take a different position than the president. Ryan couldn’t. He had to back off from starting a shooting war with Iran, of sending troops into Syria and Libya.

In fact, on every foreign policy question, Ryan conceded that the Romney-Ryan ticket agreed with all the policies of the Obama Administration, including Afghanistan. Ryan agreed with the timeline for ending U.S. involvement there and he looked positively dejected on that point. His ticket’s criticism of the president’s policy in Afghanistan is just empty rhetoric.

Did Vice President Biden go too far with his attitude?

Republican campaign advisor Steve Schmidt said Biden’s laughing and didn’t look professional to a majority of Americans. If Joe Biden had a gaffe Thursday Night, that would be it.

Only because the Right is already using it in their campaign ads. Man, that’s quick turn around. As fast as the Democrats using Romney’s attack Public Broadcasting against Romney.

For the most part though the base of the Democratic Party loved it. Biden’s constant interrupting of Ryan, constant correcting of the congressman and combative nature rattled Ryan at least once when, exasperated, Ryan implored the vice president to stop interrupting him. It reminded many of us of the time Mitt Romney asked Anderson Cooper for help when Texas Governor Rick Perry kept interrupting him in their primary debate, oh so many months ago.

My impression of Joe Biden,  (I’ve had this thought since watching Biden during the Clarence Thomas hearings)  is that Biden is the smart guy in the room who, despite the ribbing from his street fighting buddies, did good in school and went on to different ambitions. Joe Biden is the smart wise ass that still thinks he can win any debate, any argument with, “F you!” And as he proved last night, Joe Biden will look you in the eye when doing it.

And then he looked straight into the camera and asked the audience, “Who are you going to believe?” when the subject of Medicare and Social Security were the topics. The Republicans have been working to get rid of both programs since they were first created. Yeah, we know who really wants to save those and all the other social safety net programs, and it isn’t the party of Ayn Rand.

There must be a controversy — nay, a conspiracy! The crazy (or maybe crazier) wing of the Republican Party, the Tea Party to the rest of us, loves conspiracies. Chris Matthews of MSNBC was interviewing Romney surrogate, Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and she ticked off a few after the debate while she was in the spin room. “What happened in Benghazi!” (conspiracy) “What happened with ‘Fast and Furious!’ ” (conspiracy) “What happened to those job report numbers!” (conspiracy).

I swear, the MSNBC crowd gets her on just for those precious sound bites. The woman is an utter kook, which doesn’t speak well for Tennessee, at least not her district.

But this is an entirely new conspiracy and we can bet Blackburn will soon be on TV somewhere spewing out something about it. Yes, I’m talking about the fix on this debate. Just like those burly, cigar-chomping gangsters fix those big fights, the Democrats and ABC put the fix in by having the network’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, Martha Raddatz moderate the debate. This conspiracy is real — in somebody’s mind.

In 1991 Raddatz married Julius Genachowski and you know who attended that wedding? Barack Hussein Obama! That’s right! Obama was Raddatz’s secret lover! No, that’s not it. The president and Genachowski were friends who worked on the Harvard Law Review together so President Obama attended their wedding.

Raddatz and Genachowski divorced six years later, but you know she favors the president in this presidential thing and by golly she was going to weight the vice presidential debate in Vice President Biden’s favor, just to thank the president for that wonderful fondue set she received 19 years ago. Never mind that President Obama is one of her ex-husband’s best friends.

So, if it looks like Biden won the debate, it’s because Raddatz is in the tank for the Obama-Biden ticket. It stands to reason. And if it looks like Ryan won the debate, it’s because he overcame the odds and beat the conspirators at their game! Just like John Galt.

Well, not exactly like John Galt. After he and his conspirators stopped the world from functioning, when the lights went out in New York, they returned to their jobs as the people of the mind.

In Ryan’s mind, he and his conspirators are out to save American free enterprise and nothing they do to accomplish that goal is out of bounds. Problem is though, they have a new Democratic Party to deal with, one that’s not willing to roll over in the debates.

Some of those on the Right are already conceding Biden won the debate and it was due to the Raddatz fix. Sean Hannity was interviewing Sarah Palin and both talked about Biden walking all over Ryan, and it was all because the president attended the moderator’s first wedding.  Seriously, everything is a conspiracy to these people. Before the debate started, Chris Matthews was interviewing people outside the debate hall and one woman called the president a communist. When pressed to explain herself, she couldn’t, telling Matthews he didn’t do his homework on Obama.

Ed Gillespie, on the other hand, was on Morning Joe with all the confidence of a snake oil salesman, telling everyone Ryan won that debate, hands down and Biden was no match. Never mind that every other commentator, Left and Right, says Ryan and Biden represented their sides well. Even Ed Schultz, the loudmouth Lefty from MSNBC gave props to Ryan.

This is the other best part of the debate for Democrats: toward the end Raddatz asked both candidates how being Catholic informed their views on abortion. Biden gave a good answer stating this is America and he wasn’t going to impose his religious views on the rest of American. Ryan, on the other hand, made it clear that if Mitt Romney became president they damn sure would adopt any laws that would effectively outlaw abortion. Ryan put abortion in play as an official election issue and close to 75 percent of Americans disagree with that view.

Add that to Ryan’s admission that he was out to end Medicare and Social Security as we know it, and you have the two cudgels the Democrats can use to beat the Republicans over the head for the next 26 days.

Is Paul Ryan a smart guy? Well, he just told his opponents how to beat him and his running mate.

That doesn’t sound smart to me.

(Please take our poll on the right side of the homepage.  You might be surprised who is winning.)

Tim Forkes

Tim Forkes started as a writer on a small alternative college newspaper in Milwaukee called the Crazy Shepherd. Writing about entertainment issues, he had the opportunity to speak with many people in show business, from the very famous to the people struggling to find an audience. In 1992 Tim moved to San Diego, CA and pursued other interests, but remained a freelance writer. Upon arrival in Southern California he was struck by how the business of government and business was so intertwined, far more so than he had witnessed in Wisconsin. His interest in entertainment began to wane and the business of politics took its place. He had always been interested in politics, his mother had been a Democratic Party official in Milwaukee, WI, so he sat down to dinner with many of Wisconsin’s greatest political names of the 20th Century: William Proxmire and Clem Zablocki chief among them. As a Marine Corps veteran, Tim has a great interest in veteran affairs, primarily as they relate to the men and women serving and their families. As far as Tim is concerned, the military-industrial complex has enough support. How the men and women who serve are treated is reprehensible, while in the military and especially once they become veterans. Tim would like to help change that reality.

www.forkesreport.com