RED EYE - MARCH 12, 2014 FULL EPISODE

Greg welcomes guests Dana Perino and P.J. O'Rourke.

The Liberal Slandering of Paul Ryan

If you want to know how fearful the left is of Paul Ryan, consider the efforts they make to slander him. In the past, they've portrayed him as someone eager to (literally) throw grandma over a cliff. The reason? Ryan wanted to make eminently sensible and absolutely necessary changes to Medicare.

Then came Barack Obama, who, when describing Ryan's budget, made recklessly untrue assertions, saying (among other things) that Republicans want the elderly and autistic and Down syndrome children to "fend for themselves."

And now, as Jonathan Tobin has written, comes the latest attempted mugging of Ryan, this time for what he said on Bill Bennett's "Morning in America" program last week.  When discussing his forthcoming effort to combat poverty, the House Budget Committee chairman and 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate said this:

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.

The left immediately attacked. Some, like Representative Barbara Lee, accused Ryan of mounting a "thinly veiled racial attack" - one that "cannot be tolerated." Others, like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, wrote that Ryan's words amounted to a "racial dog whistle."

Why are some liberals doing this? For one thing, they are intellectually exhausted. They know they cannot win the debate on the merits, and so they resort to ad hominem attacks.

But as Jonathan points out, there's something more fundamental going on here. Liberals who have complicity in the problems plaguing America's inner cities are attempting to make an honest conversation about poverty impossible.