Helene and I were having lunch today in a local Charlottesville upscale Whole-Foods-like grocery store, which has a small coffee shop in a corner where shoppers can sit and eat items prepared in the store.
There are only a few small tables, jammed close together, so when we heard one of the three gray-hairs right next to us ask, “Aren’t you glad to have Ryan running for Vice President?” Helene of course responded (though the question wasn’t directed to us), “I am! I think he’s great!” — which turned out to be a real conversation stopper. They turned and looked at her as though she were an alien (which, of course in solid blue Charlottesville she is), and one said, “Well I hope you mean because that will make it easier to defeat them.”
When she replied that no, she actually thought Ryan was terrific, the 83 year old guy (I’d heard him mention his age earlier) announced gravely, “I think Paul Ryan is the most evil man in America,” a sentiment so widely shared that Victor Davis Hanson has written a terrific column cataloguing some choice examples (Maxine Waters, for example, has called Republican House leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor “demons“).
Thank you, Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Democrats across the land, for bringing civility back to our political discourse.
OT(ish) I’ve recently heard the same “unexpected” and sudden “awareness” script from the GLBT “activist” subset of homosexuals in my sphere of influence.