A Short Rant on "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me"

I used to listen to Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, NPR's very funny weekly news quiz, as a podcast. Some time in 2016 (I think roughly after the Florida primary), I abruptly stopped doing so, because the snark about the GOP process was just too depressing for me. (Also, my cheap phone has such little capacity.)

I was in the car this morning, though, returning from the grocery store, and I happened to flip to NPR, just when this week's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, was airing. The show starts "Who's Bill This Time?," where velvety-voiced announcer Bill Kurtis reads quotes from the previous week and asks a caller to identify the .

I didn't hear the first quote, but in context, it was pretty clearly about Trump. The host and the panelists went back and forth with some amusing bits about Trump and the truck, the fact that he doesn't share a bedroom with his wife, and his casual relationship with the truth. (The joke there was that "truth died after the Republicans took away its health insurance.")

But the second quote was the galling one. It was a Ryan quote. I'm transcribing the section below:

Bill Kurtis: "We've been dreaming of this since you and I were drinking at a keg."
Peter Sagal: "That was Speaker of the House Paul Ryan last week talking about his days as an idealistic college student drinking some beers with his bros and dreaming of taking away what from people?"

After a short pause, the caller guessed... "Medicaid?"

Sagal's response: "Close enough! Yes, health care! That's exactly right."

The caller actually was closer to Ryan's point than was the Wait Wait! staff, though. Ryan had not been "dreaming about taking away" people's health care since he was in college. He was dreaming about capping the growth rate of Medicaid and block granting it to the States, which has been a GOP wonk policy proposal for decades. Republicans passed it in 1995, and Bill Clinton vetoed it. But Democrats were of mixed minds on block grants for a long time. Democratic Governor Howard Dean of Vermont noted, "I have an open mind on block grants for Medicaid. The flexibility of a Medicaid block grant is extraordinarily appealing, but we need to work out some protection for children." Then two years later, Clinton himself proposed a version of Medicaid block granting that didn't go anywhere.

It's just a comedy quiz show--sort of The Daily Show, but a bit more clever--and I shouldn't take it seriously.  But it's one of those reasons why politics is so frustrating these days. Block granting Medicaid is not a monstrous proposal. It's a reasonable response to explosive cost growth that may or may not result in added efficiencies at the state level, and small-government-minded GOP folks like Ryan have supported the concept for a long time. But here, it's treated by the show's writers like some sort of draconian, cruel idea.

The inability to step outside of a given worldview and evaluate an idea on its own terms is destructive to the discourse. And yet it continues, unabated, as we careen further and further towards extremism.