Doocy defends Ryan: 'What's the matter with being an ideologue?'

Fox News co-host Steve Doocy on Monday attempted spin Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's "ideologue" label as an advantage to Mitt Romney's campaign.

During a series of interviews on Sunday, Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod blasted Ryan's plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system while skewing tax cuts to the wealthy, calling Wisconsin Republican a "right-wing ideologue" over and over and over again.

"They're trying to define Ryan before Mitt Romney even gets a chance to introduce Paul Ryan," Fox News host Eric Bolling noted on Monday.

"What's a matter with being an ideologue?" Doocy wondered. "I mean, an ideologue means you stand for something. And these guys clearly stand for something."

In fact, Merriam-Webster defines ideologue as "an impractical idealist" or "an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology."

And on Sunday, President Barack Obama warned that it was blind partisanship from people like Ryan which was holding the country back.

"What's holding us back is a brand of Washington politics that says we are not going to compromise no matter what," Obama said during a rally in Chicago. "It's gridlock and stalemates and dysfunction, and it's an idea propagated by the other side that somehow we're going to grow this economy from the top down and that if people at the top are doing really, really well, then everyone else is automatically going to benefit."

The president explained: "My opponent and Congressman Ryan and their allies in Congress, they all believe that if we just get rid of more regulations on big corporations and we give more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, it will lead to jobs and prosperity for everybody else."

"They have tried to sell us this trickle-down fairy dust before, and guess what? It didn't work."

Watch this video from Fox News' Fox & Friends, broadcast Aug. 13, 2012.

(h/t: Media Matters)