Charlie Sykes Interviewed the Lords of Cannibal Island Hundreds of Times...

...and every time, as they squatted atop a pile of skulls, they swore that they did not eat people.

Mr. Sykes now finds it "disconcerting" to watch them publicly gnawing the flesh off of human bones and suck out the marrow while giggling like madmen.

I interviewed Paul Ryan and Ron Johnson dozens (100s?) of times about the danger posed by the national debt. Really disconcerting to watch them now embrace bill that will add $1 trillion or more to that debt

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) December 1, 2017

It's not them, Mr. Sykes.  

They have always been this way.  

From Paul Krugman, seven years ago, back when you, Mr. Sykes, were making a mighty fine living as Wisconsin's own Rush Limbaugh clone and pimping your home-boy, Paul Ryan, as the greatest mind since Archimedes.

The Flimflam Man

One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: as long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he’s hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic.

Which brings me to the innovative thinker du jour: Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

...

Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”

But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.

And that’s about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible — which you shouldn’t — the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

And I do mean slash. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.

...

It's not them, Mr. Sykes.

It's you.

Behold, a Tip Jar!