GOP Rep. Joe Walsh: Muslims Are 'Trying to Kill Americans Every Week'

By Rebecca Leber, ThinkProgress

14 August 12

n Friday night, there were two pellet-gun shots on a mosque in the Chicago suburb Morton Grove. No one was injured, and 51-year-old David Conrad has been charged for shooting on the outer wall of the building as people prayed inside.

This was just days after Tea Party Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) delivered a town hall speech on the "real threat" of radical Muslims in the U.S. "trying to kill Americans every week." Walsh made these comments just 15 miles from Morton Grove mosque:

"One thing I'm sure of is that there are people in this country - there is a radical strain of Islam in this country - it's not just over there - trying to kill Americans every week. It is a real threat, and it is a threat that is much more at home now than it was after 9/11," Walsh said.

Walsh went on to claim that radical Islam had found its way into the Chicago suburbs, including some that he represents.

"It's here. It's in Elk Grove. It's in Addison. It's in Elgin. It's here," he said.

In the same speech, Walsh said he is "looking for some godly men and women in the Senate, in the Congress, who will stand in the face of the danger of Islam in America without political correctness," according to Salon.

By branding Islam as a violent religion, Walsh incites a familiar fear-mongering tactic that lawmakers like Michele Bachmann have been widely condemned for. Yet acts of violence against American-Muslim communities are nothing new; for example, the FBI is currently investigating a suspicious fire that recently destroyed a Missouri mosque.

The Ryan Role

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times

13 August 12

ark Kleiman points us to a lamentable but revealing column by William Saletan, which illustrates perfectly how the essentially ludicrous Paul Ryan has gotten so far - namely, by playing to the gullibility of self-proclaimed centrists, who want to show their "balance" by finding a conservative to praise.

Saletan writes:

Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn't just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals.

OK, what? Where is that coming from? Did Saletan miss the whole discussion when the Ryan plan came out? Did he miss the point where even Jacob Weisberg apologized for his initial praise, admitting that

I reacted too quickly and didn't sort out just how laughable Ryan's long-term spending projections were. His plan projects an absurd future, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in which all discretionary spending, now around 12 percent of GDP, shrinks to 3 percent of GDP by 2050. Defense spending alone was 4.7 percent of GDP in 2009. With numbers like that, Ryan is more an anarchist-libertarian than honest conservative.

Look, Ryan hasn't "crunched the numbers"; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

So why does Saletan believe otherwise? Has he crunched the numbers himself? Of course not. What he's doing - and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done - is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he's a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman's, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.

What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.