Even Moses couldn’t hide his disappointment today. He shimmied over to the Burning Bush trembling with expectation, and all he got was another Paul Ryan budget. I can’t prove it without checking with Franklin Graham, but my guess would be Moses hasn’t gotten around to reading it yet. He could probably tell from a glance it was more of the same old funky pomegranate juice.

Though the Commandments have their celestial origin, Ryan is picking up signals originating farther away indeed, so far away in fact your only chance of glimpsing the place would be in The Tree of Life  perhaps, sometime after the place burbled and boiled and cooled into a habitat for the Ryan clan. There’s certainly nothing in his budget that would do humans any good.

I will say this for Ryan: he has the tact to bury most of his lying in paperwork nobody outside the CBO and Ezra Klein, God bless him, ever reads. The persistence of Republicans in continuing to offer the nation the same prescriptions with absolutely no relationship to modern times or material reality over and over again indeed has the aura of supernatural or superhuman or even extra-human characteristics.

If you managed without resort to documented powers of extrasensory perception to predict Ryan’s new Republican budget would lower taxes even more for the wealthy and corporations, keep military spending high, and decimate all the rest that provides a modicum of security to the aged, the poor and the middle-class, or invests in rebuilding, educating or caring for Americans in the future, you are due only the mildest congratulations I’m afraid.

This new version of the same old stupid shit does not neglect to include a Great Medicare Voucher Swindle 2.0 sure to be received with similarly soaring rates of barfing and hurling among the American public as the original was. These Republicans are ideologues all but immobilized for eternity in amber: nothing about them is going to change, ever. Pretending their recommended economic policies did not rule the day and then ruin it during the Bush years, that trickle-down, income disparity, low wages, lack of public investment are not factually and historically documented failures is the odious Omertà none of them will violate, and which shows no signs of cracking in a currently visible future.

Ryan’s budget plans old and new are received worshipfully in Republican World and endorsed by the presidential candidates, all of their economic palaver in the same fantastical vein. The new budget (and one can say this about virtually all Republican budget and deficit discussions) is an iconic statement of dogmatically induced willed astigmatism that misses the singularly most important economic determinative America now faces: the rising costs of health care and an aging population.  Republicans will not so much as mention, much less suggest reforms to a private health insurance system whose costs provide lucre galore for certain vested interests, and lots of campaign bullion for the Republican Party, but only perpetuate the same budget-draining health care burden.

What Republicans lack in factuality, practicality and reality they compensate for with unrelenting lying of a remarkably unembarrassed and ethically unashamed sort. For instance, the only enacted effort to date which would address the nation’s salient financial challenge: the abominable amount of GDP America devotes to paying for health care, inadequate health care by international standards, the Affordable Care Act, is referred to by Republicans consistently as a “complete government takeover of one-sixth of the American economy.” This about a reform that in fact backs truckloads of additional profits up to private health insurers’ loading dock and dumps.

It is this all-encompassing reduction to irrationality and disinformation that is most indicative the Republican Party has degenerated  into a cult of kooks, cranks and brazen prevaricators, an estranged, no longer useful or viable participant in the American polity. My advice: If you find brazen dishonesty and vicious demagoguery disconcerting, and you’re planning to follow Republican politics these days, gird your loins.