Quote:Paul Ryan Will Retire as the Biggest Fake in American Politics
If he hadn't done so much damage, we could laugh him off the national stage—like Joe Biden did.
By Charles P. Pierce
Apr 11, 2018
Getty Images
It’s probably too much to hope that Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, will dedicate his retirement to public service the way that his immediate predecessor has.
Acreage Holdings (“Acreage”) (www.acreageholdings.com), one of the nation’s largest, multi-state actively-managed cannabis corporations, announced the appointments of former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives John Boehner and former Governor of the State of Massachusetts Bill Weld to its Board of Advisors.
Instead, he’s going back to Janesville to be the Dad he’s always wanted to be, home to his 5,786-foot Georgian mansion on Courthouse Hill, and its 13 rooms, six bedrooms and seven bathrooms, the little house on the Wisconsin prairie that Ryan was able to afford because he married money, the one that’s on the National Register of Historic Places.
Paul Ryan has somehow amassed a fortune of between four and seven million dollars without holding any job except “Congressman” for the past 20 years.
Getty Images
(By the way, the Dad concerns somehow were muted back in 2012. If things had broken differently, Ryan would be in his sixth year as vice-president of the United States and, of course, he would not be planning to succeed President Romney because there would be high-school plays he couldn’t miss.)
Now, he’s coming home to the district he’s avoided like the plague ever since the current midterm election cycle began. Last weekend, for example, he had to put his full-time Dad job on hold in order to go to Texas and raise money.
I’m sure they had to drag him onto the airplane to go to Houston. I’m sure they’ll have to pry him out of the family manse to raise more money as we get closer to what may be a Republican cataclysm in November, the way they had to pry him out a couple of days ago for a quick trip to Georgia to raise some money there, too, and the way they had to pry him out to go to Savannah, or Texas.
Getty Images
As a longtime connoisseur of Ryan’s public fakery, I may never decide what about him I find the most nauseating—the retrograde policies that he gussies up as concern for the poor and downtrodden, or the wet-eyed phony sincerity with which he sells them. Even in his press conference on Wednesday, Ryan expressed disappointment that, in his two decades in Congress, he didn’t get to fully gut Medicaid and Social Security. From C-SPAN:
Entitlement reform is the one thing, the one other great thing I spent most of my career working on. I’m extremely proud of the fact that the House passed the biggest entitlement reform bill in the history of the House of Representatives.
Do I regret that the Senate did not pass this? Yes. But I feel, from all the budgets that I’ve passed, normalizing entitlement reform, and the House passing entitlement reform, I’m very proud of that fact. But of course, more work needs to be done. And it really is entitlements. That’s where the work needs to be done. And I’m going to keep fighting for that.
This would include, of course, “reforming,” probably out of existence, the Social Security survivor’s benefits that got him through high school and college before he could line up at the federal trough for the rest of his adult life. He is, however, very proud of the grotesque tax bill he managed to pass.
The major reform of our tax code for the first time in 36 years. Which has only been a huge success for this country, and that’s something I’ve been working on my entire adult life.
Ryan’s entire public career has been dedicated to shoving the nation’s wealth upwards and into the pockets of his donor class. It was the basis for the ridiculous reputation he built up through the years in which he was portrayed as a disinterested policy wonk, in which capacity he produced budget after budget that were chock-a-block with magic asterisks and fuzzy math, and most of which caused his Republican colleagues to hide behind the drapes when he walked down the halls.
The illusion died a horrible death in 2012, when Ryan sat down on stage next to Joe Biden and Biden literally laughed him off. You may recall that Ryan revealed that, yes, it does snow in Afghanistan during the winter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXfWgiaB41A
Further, there was that great moment in which Ryan started inveighing against President Obama’s stimulus plan only to have Biden produce a letter from Ryan in which Ryan was begging for pork for some project back in his district.
It also was the reason why, as this administration* has steadily been revealed as corrupt and incompetent, and a danger to fundamental democratic norms, as Speaker of the House, Ryan has been utterly supine. Quite simply, he didn’t give a damn about any of that as long as he got the plutocrat’s dream of a tax bill that he’s been working toward his entire adult life.
Biggest. Fake. Ever.
And where are we now, back in Wisconsin 01? There’s a spirited Democratic primary between ironworker Randy (Iron Stache) Bryce and Cathy Myers, a member of the school board in Janesville.
The only announced Republican candidate is….wait for it…a crazy-assed white supremacist named Paul Nehlen, whom Ryan crushed in a primary two years ago, and who made the news recently by being suspended by Twitter for a racist post about Megan Markle. From Newsweek:
In the tweet, he superimposed a picture on Markle’s image of the reconstructed appearance of Cheddar Man, an ancient Briton who experts now believe was dark skinned after conducting DNA tests on his 9,000-year-old remains.
It would be great if every respectable Republican in the district ran and hid and left Nehlen as the party’s standard-bearer in the race to replace Paul Ryan. It also would be quite fitting.
Ryan always served as one of the more “respectable” faces of a Republican Party that was steadily going mad. He didn’t care as long as the people who bought him dinner were happy with how he was rigging the nation’s economy on their behalf. Now, he’s going home to spend more time with his donor…er…family.
Don’t it make my zombie eyes blue?
1
