The Open Thread for Sunday, August 4, 2013

Dana Milbank:

Republicans need to make up their minds: Is President Obama a socialist or a corporate stooge?

“The president claims his economic agenda is for the middle class. But it’s actually for the well-connected,” Paul Ryan, the GOP’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, wrote this week in USA Today, rejecting Obama’s latest proposal for a corporate tax cut. “There’s no doubt that it works well for them. But for the rest of us, it’s not working at all.”…

Ryan, in his brief commentary, protested that Obama is “interested in tax reform for corporations — but not for families or small business.” He further accused Obama of implementing health-care and regulatory policies that favor big businesses and big banks.

That’s rich.

Ryan, after all, is the guy who just a year ago accused Obama of “sowing social unrest and class resentment,” of supporting “a government-run economy” and of “denigrating people who are successful.” He has charged the president with leading the nation toward “a cradle-to-grave, European-style social welfare state.” […]

Republican lawmakers seem to think that Americans have short memories and lack Internet connections, for their latest line of attack — that Obama’s health-care and tax policies favor the corporate elite — directly contradicts their previous allegation that Obama was waging “class warfare” with “socialist” policies attacking these very same corporate elites.