Is it the Czar’s imagination, or have the mainstream media largely ignored the Paul Ryan budget proposal? You know all about it of course, because you tend to use multiple news sources…but only scant mention in the local papers and news shows.

While you may be inclined to suspect that the media wants to bury the story as potentially injurious to Democrats, the Czar thinks the explanation might be more prosaic.

This is tough stuff, and the average journalist is pretty stupid.

The more likely reason is that the media are sitting back, waiting for a few popular pundits to put for the pros and cons out on Google, which the media will then summarize and put into a short bullet list.

This will probably both help and hurt the Ryan proposal, in that liberals can downplay its obvious effectiveness (ouch), but can also suggest to the average person that there is real substance to this proposal, and that days or weeks of review have failed to find anything seriously wrong with it.

Already, most of the Democrats’s responses have been immediately flawed—there have been accusations that Ryan is ending Medicaid or Medicare, and even Nancy Pelosi claims it will cause millions of seniors to starve. On the one hand, the little media mention there has been has been parroting, not debunking, this stuff; on the other hand, these accusations are demonstrably false on the slightest skimming of the proposal. So nobody is buying it outside the echo chambers.

Let us see where this goes. It is fair to say that Ryan’s proposal is unprecedented, so even the Czar is at a loss to predict how this will go.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.