Wonky Means Crooked



Presumptive vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan has had to expend a lot of energy lately explaining how he and Mitt Romney can criticize President Obama's cutting Medicare costs while at the same time they plan on using those same cuts in their budget plan. 

The Affordable Care Act reduces costs to Medicare by $716 billion over ten years without reducing any benefits paid out to seniors on Medicare for services and uses those savings to pay for other parts of the health care bill. Ryan's budget plan counts on those savings in his budget plan, which Republican nominee Romney calls "marvelous". The natural question is how the two Republicans can praise and plan to use those cuts but then accuse Obama of "gutting Medicare" for doing the same thing. Paul Ryan dismisses it by saying it's "wonky". He states "It gets a  little wonky," but they can criticize Obama because he put those cuts "in the base line"; he states "We would never have done it (passed the health care law patterned after Romney's Massachusetts health care overhaul) in the first place", and because he voted to repeal the entire law it's OK for him to support the very same Medicare cuts Obama supported. But if the cuts are a good idea outside of the health care law why where they a bad idea within it? Notice they are not criticising Obama for what he's done with the cuts, but only the cuts themselves.

A google search using the terms "Paul Ryan" and "wonky" shows a plethora of articles that describe Ryan and his policies as "wonky"; one might assume they are saying that he is himself a wonk, a person who is very interested in a subject and has a broad knowledge of it.  But it should be noted that if you search for the definition of the word "wonky" the first word of the first result is "crooked", and after that you have terms like "shaky", "feeble", "whacked out" and my favorite "not working for no definable reason". Considering Ryan's establishment of this obvious distinction without a difference to explain his and Romney's attack on Obama for enacting a measure they intend to keep in force, perhaps these definitions for the term "wonky" are more apt after all.