This Was Supposed to Be Christmas in March for Pa

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This Was Supposed to Be Christmas in March for Paul Ryan

But now he and his tax cut are under attack.


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By Charles P. Pierce Mar 14, 2017

This was supposed to be a ride on the glory train for Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin.

The Congressional Budget Office's scoring of his mock health-care bill proved that said bill defined his entire political philosophy and did exactly what he meant it to do—inflict the maximum pain on society's takers while shoving more of the nation's wealth upward to the people who buy Paul Ryan his $500 bottles of wine.

This should be Christmas in March for Paul Ryan. He even got a snowstorm for himself. It should be a White Christmas for Paul Ryan.

Oh, sure, the Democratic minority in the Congress carped and moaned about old people and poor people, and what's going to happen when the cost of health care outpaces their entire annual income but, hell, they should have sucked up to the right people when they had the chance.

And, besides, look at the deficit projections! Those must be music to the ears of the members of the bipartisan non-consensus of the Simpson-Bowles Mystery Cult. From Fox News:

Ryan told host Bret Baier that the CBO's prediction that 14 million more Americans would be uninsured in 2018 was due to the bill's overturning of ObamaCare's individual mandate. "Of course they're going to say if we stop forcing people to buy something they don't want to buy they're not going to buy it," Ryan said.

"That's why you have these uninsured numbers, which we all expected." According to Ryan, the key numbers in the analysis would come once the bill's reforms took effect in 2020. "It will lower premiums 10 percent. It stabilizes the market. It's a $1.2 trillion spending cut, and $883 billion tax cut and $337 billion in deficit reduction," Ryan said. "So, this compared to the status quo is far better."

(By the way, Ryan's gloating over an $883 billion tax cut is yet another definite tell that this bill really had more to do with the health of certain bank accounts than the health of actual American human beings, as was his insistence later in the interview that the passage of this lemon was essential to the passage of his notion of "tax reform" later this year.)

So there were the expected complaints from the usual quarters, the folks who have been yelping for years that Ryan is the biggest fake ever to hit the republic and that he has all the humane instincts of a Gaboon viper. He was ready for that.

But, wait, what's this? From Breitbart, via The Hill?

Incoming!

The call between Ryan and members of the House GOP conference came shortly after "Access Hollywood" tapes of Trump making lewd comments about women became public, rocking the GOP ticket and prompting Republicans to call for Trump leave the ticket. "I am not going to defend Donald Trump—not now, not in the future," Ryan says in the audio obtained by Breitbart News.

The October call was for House Republican members, Breitbart said, and it's unclear who was on the call and whether the participants knew they were being recorded. "Look, you guys know I have real concerns with our nominee," Ryan said on the call. "… This is going to be a turbulent month.

Many of you on this call are facing tough reelections. Some of you are not. But with respect to Donald Trump, I would encourage you to do what you think is best and do what you feel you need to do. Personally, you need to decide what's best for you. And you all know what's best for you where you are."

Ryan took one right in the baby blues there.

It's no secret that Ryan is an object of loathing on the part of Steve Bannon, last heir to House Harkonnen and White House senior political strategist. It's also not unreasonable to suspect that Bannon still has connections to the mausoleum for the otherwise unemployable that he used to run.

If Bannon wanted to fck with Ryan's head on the day Ryan was trying to sell his monstrous fraud of a healthcare bill, then this would be the perfect way to do it.

Already, in the House, Ryan is afflicted with the Freedom Caucus, the members of which consider this monstrous bill less monstrous than it should be. So, now, if they didn't have one before, they have a reason to gibber in public against a Speaker they never entirely trusted in the first place.

The release of this tape is a classic ratfck in both design and in execution. I have to compliment the ratfckers in question on their technique, if not their fundamental morality. It's like microbiologists gazing in awe at a new and lethal virus.

I don't believe this particular exercise has a great impact on the fate of the new bill as policy. The people who don't like Ryan weren't going to vote for it anyway and, like Julius Caesar, it's already dead meat in the Senate.

(Even if it somehow made it to the president*'s desk, he'd sign it no matter what Paul Ryan may have said about him last October, because signing it beats working for a living.)

But, as a shot across the bow, it's highly effective. If Ryan didn't know he had enemies in the White House, and that those enemies have allies in his own caucus, he knows now.

Somebody in Congress leaked that tape. If that gives Paul Ryan only a half-second of the kind of agita that his fake bill would make permanent among the poor and the sick and the elderly, then whoever leaked it deserves a medal.[/ quote]

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