In a disingenuous flair of rhetorical nonsense, the Chair of the House Budget Committee told the Heritage Foundation that President Barack Obama was “sowing unrest and class resentment… (and) preying on the emotions of fear…”

In his October 25 speech before the ultra-right organization Paul Ryan said that Obama is making “America weaker, not stronger” and he accused the President of “exacerbating class warfare.”

This is from the man who authored a budget that gave tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and slashed programs that serve the poor, elderly and disabled.  This audacious claim was made by a man whose party has relentlessly attacked the President, labeling him an illegal alien, a Muslim, a socialist.

In fact, Ryan and his colleagues are the culprits who have stoked unrest and class resentment through their tax proposals and social agenda, and they regularly impugn the motives of the President, Democrats and all of us who fight for a progressive agenda. When we dare to invite them to think rationally, they loudly accuse us of “sowing social unrest.”

It is Ryan who represents a Party that preyed “on the emotions of fear” that led America into what I believe was a senseless war in Iraq, and they used fear to gain public acceptance for dismantling individual freedoms through the Patriot Act.

Fanning fear has been a primary Republican campaign tactic in elections since 2004 when President Bush ran for reelection by stoking the memory of 9/11 and suggesting that only he could save us from another terrorist attack.

This 2004 fear of terrorism has been updated to fear of “the other”:  fear of undocumented aliens taking “our jobs”, fear of gay and lesbian people perverting God’s marital mandates, fear that regulations on industry— environmental, financial and safety— are the cause of any recession.

And most of all, they tell us to fear President Obama because he will destroy “our America” by advocating Sharia law, turning the country to socialism, and selling out the country to a one-world government.

The ultimate irony is that it is Republicans who are the one-worldists: a world focused solely on profiteering of the few undergirded by cheap labor from the many— and ruled, of course, by their exceptional America.

The Republican leaders are betting that by stoking fear of the President in the minds of the voters people will forget that the Republican-led House refuses to introduce almost any Obama proposal for a vote.

They are betting that most people will dismiss as irrelevant the Senate Republicans’ filibuster of the President’s initiatives on jobs, budget and taxes, key appointments, and environmental sustainability, thus preventing them from being voted on.  And Republicans are betting that the people will believe them when they label him a “do-nothing” President.

When President Obama fights back, when he tells the truth about the unprincipled behavior of Republicans, he is accused (in Ryan’s words) of  “impugning the motives of Republicans, setting up straw men and scapegoats, and engaging in intellectually lazy arguments…”

Congressman Ryan must have been looking in a mirror when he wrote that speech.