Your Republican Week In Review

This post is dedicated to the brilliant Jack Grant (1965-2011),
a friend and pioneering blogger who never abided fools.

The House Republican leadership's spectacular record of defeats, concessions and embarrassments remains intact after week in which (not counting the Donald Trump-Sarah Palin pizza party) the most notable event was a mano a mano exchange between Representative Paul Ryan and President Obama.

Ryan, who almost singlehandedly has jeopardized Republican gains in the House and given Democrats yet another cudgel to whack them with in 2012, reached into the Dubya lexicon to whine that the president was "mis-describing" his deficit reduction plan -- which gives bread and water to the peasants and tax cuts to the rich -- and pleaded with him to ease up on the "demagoguery."

Obama, tongue firmly in cheek, responded by reeling off a list of conservatives' favorite demagogic attacking points: "I’m the death-panel-supporting, socialist, may-not-have-been-born-here president."

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Reeling from the successful Democratic attack on the Ryan plan, which is even opposed by a healthy majority of unhealthy Republican voters, House Republicans moved on to set themselves up for a beating on their opposition to raising the debt limit.

It is now obvious that voters will blame them for the failure to pass an increase in the debt ceiling and the attendant unpleasant consequences, and they can't look to the Gipper for solace on this one.

This is because Ronald Reagan, the great conservative father figure himself, vigorously supported raising the debt ceiling when the need arose.

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Meanwhile, the Republicans took a break from their war on women to go to war for obesity.

The GOP is using an agriculture appropriations bill to try to undermine an Obama administration effort to require school meals that are more nutritional and restrain food companies in their marketing of junk food to children.

The reason? Meals containing more fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy will cost an estimated additional $7 billion over five years -- money that Republicans say the U.S. can ill afford in tough economic times.

Meanwhile, taxpayers spend billions and billions each year -- as much as a staggering $147 billion by one estimate -- for the medicare care that obese Americans inevitably require.

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Beyond the Trump-Palin pizza party, the big news in the presidential sweepstakes was the entry of Mitt Romney, and it will be interesting to see how his campaign plays in Michigan, where his auto executive father was a popular governor in the 1960s.

Romney the Younger has a lot of explaining to do when he visits the state of his birth. This is because he penned a New York Times op-ed piece in 2008 declaring that the Big Three automakers should be allowed to fail.

As it is, GM and Chrysler are doing a boffo business after a taxpayer bailout that received scant Republican support and strong opposition from Republicans whose Southern state districts including the plants of Japanese automakers. (Ford did not need a handout and also is profiting handsomely.)

Incidentally, Romney's father made a run for the presidential nomination but ended up killing his own candidacy by admitting to having been "brainwashed" on Vietnam.

What will Mitt's excuse be? That he was brainwashed on Detroit?

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The attention-getting Palin is, of course, touring the country in a ritzy custom-painted chartered bus (since marred by "Media Whore" spray paint graffiti) and couldn't resist take a shot at Romney for his support of government mandates when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Never one to let facts get in the way of her own special brand of demagoguery, she of course failed to mention that she supported numerous mandates as the half-term governor of Alaska.