It's not just Ryan, though. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) says he opposes the Gang of Six plan because it cuts too deeply into military spending.

And, perhaps most telling of all, a Senate GOP Leadership Aide told Politico, "Background guidance: The President killed any chance of its success by 1) Embracing it. 2) Hailing the fact that it increases taxes. 3) Saying it mirrors his own plan."

One imagines that if Obama'd said nothing, GOP aides would be complain just as loudly that the President hasn't publicly embraced any proposal coming out of Congress. Now that he has, Republicans will run away -- and that's just what we're seeing.

A group of House Democratic women called Wednesday on Republican leaders to rebuke Rep. Allen B. West (R-Fla.) for calling Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) “vile,” “despicable” and “not a lady.”

Reps. Gwen Moore (Wis.), Lois Capps (Calif.), Jackie Speier (Calif.), Donna F. Edwards (Md.) and Carolyn B. Maloney (N.Y.) said that West should apologize for his comments and that House GOP leaders should publicly disavow them.

“We see this as a historic and systemic way that women have been subjected to sexism particularly in this venue, in this political environment,” Moore said. ”Just once again, we have been told that in order to be a ‘lady,’ we need to just stay in our places.”

On Wednesday, Maloney said, “I’ve got to tell you that standing up for what you believe in, speaking out on the floor of Congress, and getting elected to office is very ladylike, Mr. West. And I’d like to say that I believe it’s sad that Mr. West felt he had to resort to that kind of language, but they resort to that type of language because they cannot win on the merits.”

The New York Democrats added, “If [West] had given those comments on the floor of the House of Representatives, his words would have been taken down and stricken from the record because his words were nothing more than personal attacks, and the rules of this Congress do not permit personal attacks.”

West contributed to a Florida magazine that called women “oral relief stations”: Before he was elected to Congress, West was a monthly contributor to “Miami Mike’s Wheels On The Road,” a biker magazine that billed itself as the “South Florida Biker’s Bible.” The magazine has featured multiple overtly misogynistic articles, including one asking readers to imagine having sex with Wasserman Schultz. At other times, the magazine’s writers referred to women as “oral relief stations,” complained about women who said “their knees hurt,” depicted women as servants of men, and suggested that they should wear “slave chokers” as accessories.

West claimed liberal women were “neutering” American men and causing a crisis of leadership in America: In a speech to a Women Impacting Nation (WIN) meeting, West blamed liberal women — “these Planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women” — for “neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness.” Such women were fighting “to have our men become subservient,” West said, before bizarrely adding that this new-found subservience would continue to make the nation’s debt and deficits grow.

West compared conservative women to Spartans, asking them to “raise strong men”: In the same speech, West compared conservative women to the women of Sparta, who he claimed were the real strength behind the men of the ancient Greek city-state. The role of conservative women, West said, was to “raise strong men,” just as it was in Sparta. As Mediaite’s Frances Martel noted at the time, Spartan women had no political rights and were trained to be strong solely for the betterment of males. West’s comparison to Sparta implies that he believes “strong women are to raise strong men,” Martel wrote. “Strong women are not just to be, the way strong men are.”