The Foul Legacy of Paul Ryan

Other than Donald Trump, one of the biggest liars and frauds in Washington, D.C., is soon to be former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a man who never deserved to be treated as a serious conservative voice.  His relentless efforts to slash funding for the less fortunate in order to shower massive tax cuts on the obscenely wealthy while feigning to be a devout Catholic demonstrate  Ryan's rank hypocrisy.  Worse yet, since January 20, 2017, Ryan has put the interest of the nation and the rule of law beneath rank partisanship and protecting an occupant of the White House who is likely guilty of obstruction of justice, if not actual treason.  Ryan should never have been given respect much less treated as someone honest.  With Ryan leaving at the end of his current term, a column in the Washington Post  by a former Republican looks at Ryan's foul legacy.  Here are column excerpts:

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s last year in office is proving disastrous, a fitting end to the speakership of a man once considered a principled conservative reformer. His refusal to fulfill his constitutional role as leader of the House but rather play the role of presidential poodle and Republican attack dog for his increasingly unhinged caucus has had dire consequences for the GOP House majority, the intelligence oversight process and the broader conservative movement.

Among his most egregious failures has been his refusal to rein in House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who, in concert with the White House, created a phony “unmasking” scandal and released a misleading memo casting aspersions on the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in connection with the warrant to conduct surveillance on suspected spy Carter Page. As Nunes’s crowd, together with the president, now threatens to reveal a secret FBI and CIA source, in an unprecedented breach of the House’s intelligence oversight responsibilities, the extent of Ryan’s reckless disregard for his oath becomes clear.

There is no evidence the FBI behaved improperly. (“The FBI commonly uses sources and informants to gather evidence and its regulations allow for use of informants even before a formal investigation has been opened. In many law enforcement investigations, the use of sources and informants precedes more invasive techniques such as electronic surveillance.”) . . . . had the FBI failed to follow up on evidence that a presidential campaign was engaged in secret communications with a foreign government, it would have been excoriated for dereliction of duty. Moreover, none of this was revealed during the campaign — in stark contrast to the airing of the allegations against Hillary Clinton for misuse of email, an action that looks downright trivial in comparison with a far-flung Russian plot to boost Trump, a scheme that at critical points was eagerly greeted by top members of the Trump campaign. 

At any stage in this outrageous attack on American intelligence operations and the Justice Department, Ryan could have stepped in to replace members of the Intelligence Committee, to reprimand them and/or to rebuff the president’s attempt to interfere with and smear investigators seeking to uncover an attack on our democracy. 

Ryan’s legacy will be not only of someone who politically enabled an unfit president, but also of someone who presided over the erosion of trust required for a proper intelligence oversight process. Ryan has done his party no favors in permitting it to become irrational conspiratorialists and antagonists of our intelligence community. His passivity has only encouraged Trump to abuse his powers, which may, when the facts are laid bare, amount to obstruction of justice.

This week Ryan completely lost control of his own troops, watching the farm bill go down in humiliating fashion as he tried to stave off an immigration compromise that might actually pass. He is no longer doing the people’s business . . . . . Perhaps he should retire now. Any temporary replacement could hardly do a worse job for the remaining months of the GOP majority.

Paul Ryan To Republicans: Lose House, Cover-Ups Will End

As regular readers know, I hold Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives for a while longer, in almost as much contempt as Donald Trump.   What perhaps makes Ryan worse than Trump is the fact that Trump, in my view is mentally ill and a malignant narcissist, whereas Ryan knows and understands precisely what he he is doing.  His reverse Robin Hood agenda makes a mockery of his feigned devout Catholicism.  Now, in statements pertaining to the future should Republicans lose control of the House and/or the Senate, Ryan has more or less admitted that he has participated in the obstruction of justice and actively aided and abetted in the cover up of the Trump regimes lies and likely crimes. Thankfully, Ryan will be out of office after January, 2019, but the harm that he has done to America will last for many, many years to come.  New York Magazine looks at Ryan's startling admission. Here are highlights:

Paul Ryan appeared at a financial conference to warn that, if Democrats win control of either the House or the Senate in the November elections, “you’ll have gridlock, you’ll have subpoenas.” The gridlock part is true, but it is basically the case already.

What really would change with Democratic control of a chamber is the subpoena part. But it’s worth spelling out just what it is Ryan is warning will happen — and what, by implication, he is confessing.

Ryan’s House has been run essentially as a subordinate arm of the Trump administration. Ryan and his party have quashed votes to compel release of Donald Trump’s tax returns, and they have used their investigative power not to oversee the presidency but to harass and intimidate the Department of Justice into falling into line behind the president’s whims, to the point where the acting attorney general had to bluntly accuse House Republicans of trying to “extort” him. Trump and his family have used their power to enrich themselves personally, with no hearings or oversight whatsoever from the House. His Cabinet members have likewise misspent funds and abused their authority without any accountability from the committees that are putatively tasked with the job.

Ryan has played an invaluable role covering up and enabling Trump administration scandals. When he says his party needs to keep control of the House to prevent subpoenas, he is both promising the cover-ups will continue if his party keeps its control of government, and expressing his clear belief that he opposes any level of independent oversight of the Executive branch.

As to Paul Ryan, I can only say good riddance.  His departure cannot come soon enough.

Joe Scarborough: An Argument for Leaving the GOP

The Republican Party has, in my view, become something hideous.  It has intertwined itself with white supremacists and religious extremists.  It now turns a blind eye towards the interference in our elections by a hostile foreign government.  Its fiscal policies are ever increasing military spending even as Der Trumpenführer disengages America from its leadership role in the world, and a savaging of the majority of Americans so as to benefit the very wealthy with  lavish tax cuts.  Poor children and the impoverished elderly are simply something to be cast aside.  Ditto for working Americans faced with the prospect of  the loss of health insurance. I left the Republican Party when much of this cancer in the GOP was in its early stages.  Many chose instead to close their eyes to reality and support a party that was more heinous by the day.    Former congressman and TV personality Joe Scarborough was one such individual.  Now, with the cancer in the GOP metastatic, he too has left the GOP and explains why in this piece.  Here are highlights: 

I did not leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left its senses. The political movement that once stood athwart history resisting bloated government and military adventurism has been reduced to an amalgam of talk-radio resentments. President Trump’s Republicans have devolved into a party without a cause, dominated by a leader hopelessly ill-informed about the basics of conservatism, U.S. history and the Constitution.

America’s first Republican president reportedly said , “Nearly all men can stand adversity. But if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” The current Republican president and the party he controls were granted monopoly power over Washington in November and already find themselves spectacularly failing Abraham Lincoln’s character exam.  . . . . the Republican leaders who have subjugated themselves to the White House’s corrupting influence fell short of Lincoln’s standard long before their favorite reality-TV star brought his gaudy circus act to Washington.
 When I left Congress in 2001, I praised my party’s successful efforts to balance the budget for the first time in a generation and keep many of the promises that led to our takeover in 1994. I concluded my last speech on the House floor by foolishly predicting that Republicans would balance budgets and champion a restrained foreign policy for as long as they held power.
 I would be proved wrong immediately.

As the new century began, Republicans gained control of the federal government. George W. Bush and the GOP Congress responded by turning a $155 billion surplus into a $1 trillion deficit and doubling the national debt, passing a $7 trillion unfunded entitlement program and promoting a foreign policy so utopian it would have made Woodrow Wilson blush. Voters made Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House in 2006 and Barack Obama president in 2008.

After their well-deserved drubbing, Republicans swore that if voters ever entrusted them with running Washington again, they would prove themselves worthy. Trump’s party was given a second chance this year, but it has spent almost every day since then making the majority of Americans regret it.

The GOP president questioned America’s constitutional system of checks and balances. Republican leaders said nothing. He echoed Stalin and Mao by calling the free press “the enemy of the people.” Republican leaders were silent. And as the commander in chief insulted allies while embracing autocratic thugs, Republicans who spent a decade supporting wars of choice remained quiet. Meanwhile, their budget-busting proposals demonstrate a fiscal recklessness very much in line with the Bush years.

It is a dying party that I can no longer defend.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham has long predicted that the Republican and Democrats’ 150-year duopoly will end. The signs seem obvious enough. When my Republican Party took control of Congress in 1994, it was the first time the GOP had won the House in a generation. The two parties have been in a state of turmoil ever since. . . . . last fall, Trump demolished both the Republican and Democratic establishments.

Political historians will one day view Donald Trump as a historical anomaly. But the wreckage visited of this man will break the Republican Party into pieces — and lead to the election of independent thinkers no longer tethered to the tired dogmas of the polarized past.

The end cannot come soon enough in my view.  The question is one of how many will suffer and die before the end of the Trump/GOP reign of terror is over.   

The GOP's Biggest Loser on Healthcare Debacle: Paul Ryan

Delcan & Company; Photo by Al Drago/The New York Times

I and others have been making the case that of the Congressional Republicans perhaps the biggest fraud is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.  His hypocrisy is almost unlimited, especially as he claims to be a dutiful Catholic out of one side of his mouth while at the same time pushing policies that are abhorrent from the perspective of the Catholic Church's social gospel.  For far too long, the media has give Ryan a pass on this breath taking hypocrisy.  Worse yet, many journalists have acted as if Ryan is a serious thinker and a policy expert.  The realty is that these images are empty and unsupported by objective facts.  If Ryan is expert at anything, it is at devising ways to take from the poor and middle class while give to the wealthy and then openly lying about the horrific impact of his policies on average Americans.  Thankfully, last week's American Health Care Act debacle may finally have the laudatory effect of showing the shallowness and cravenness - I would even argue moral bankruptcy - of Mr. Ryan.  A main page editorial in the New York Times does a wonderful take down of Ryan. Here are highlights:

“Look, I’m a policy guy.” That was Paul Ryan’s line before last Friday, when the health care bill he designed in secret went down without a vote, his own party showing what they thought of his policy.

Time and again when he was asked about President Trump’s attacks on immigrants or the courts, his ties to Russia or his claims of massive election fraud, the speaker of the House would say he was too busy working on his agenda, “A Better Way,” to think about all that nasty stuff.

That Mr. Ryan failed on the policy promise that Republicans have been running on for eight years makes it clear that if he is the policy wonk of the Republican Party, then the Republican Party has no policy. And with a health care plan that would have stripped 24 million Americans of basic care and drastically hiked premiums for people over 60, it seems that they don’t much care what Americans need or want.

The discrepancy between promise and reality should be no surprise to anyone who has looked at Mr. Ryan’s proposals over the years. Mr. Ryan has been rolling out grand pronouncements in bound volumes with fancy covers and snappy names, but the main message never changed: America‘s “path to prosperity” (remember that one? 2011) lies in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, and slashing social programs and regulations.

Three years ago, a House Republican leader said his report on antipoverty programs showed that “Paul Ryan remains our big-ideas guy.” We called it “a high-minded excuse” to “eviscerate programs like Medicaid, Head Start and food stamps.”

After Mitt Romney, with Mr. Ryan as his running mate, lost the presidential election in 2012, . . . . Mr. Ryan responded by repackaging the same agenda for the 2016 election, even though working-class Americans were demonstrating fury at his establishment orthodoxy. They didn’t want Social Security cut and they wanted the “health care for everybody” that Mr. Trump promised.

After seven years and 60 failed Republican efforts to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, Mr. Ryan finally got his moment, and blew it.

After pulling the bill, Mr. Ryan showed he hadn’t given up on trying to make people think he was someone they could believe in. With no detectable irony, he described his humiliating defeat as “an incredible opportunity,” adding “There remains so much that we can do to help improve people’s lives, and we will.”

But he’s fooling no one any longer. Put to the test, Mr. Ryan revealed that all along, he doesn’t have anything more creative in his cranium than stale conservative dogma.

He had helped fulfill a cynical prophecy delivered last month by John Boehner, . . . . . “In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress,” Mr. Boehner said, “Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once. And all this happy talk that went on in November and December and January about repeal, repeal, repeal — yeah, we’ll do replace, replace — I started laughing.”

We might thank Mr. Ryan for one thing. His dreadful legislation drove voters of both parties to flood town halls and the Capitol, demanding that Congress reject the bill.

One can only hope that going forward, the media will recognize Ryan for the small minded phony that he is and give him media coverage that no longer aids the pretense that the man is a serious thinker.  

A Great Take Down of Paul Ryan - And the Media That Created Him

With the GOP proposal to repeal and "replace" Obamacare, we are seeing a shining example of the lies and hypocrisy of Paul Ryan that one can hope will once and for all expose the cruelty and meanness of the man and his party.  One can also hope that the train wreck that is Ryancare or Trumpcare (whichever label you prefer) will finally get the mainstream media to stop its game of false equivalency once and for all.  The sad reality is that one political party holds the poor, minorities, and the middle class in contempt and the other does not. One political party wants to loot the nation to benefit the wealthy and the other does not. Yet inexplicably, the media has acted as if GOP proposals - and GOP elected officials - need to be treated as if they were serious and something other than what they are: an effort to give lavish tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations while gutting programs that serve the majority of citizens and removing regulations that protect the public safety and the environment.  A column in the New York Times looks at the falsity of Paul Ryan and the irresponsible media that has contributed to the debacle that has overcome the nation.  Here are excerpts:

Many people are horrified, and rightly so, by what passes for leadership in today’s Washington. And it’s important to keep the horror of our political situation up front, to keep highlighting the lies, the cruelty, the bad judgment. We must never normalize the state we’re in.

At the same time, however, we should be asking ourselves how the people running our government came to wield such power. How, in particular, did a man whose fraudulence, lack of concern for those he claims to care about and lack of policy coherence should have been obvious to everyone nonetheless manage to win over so many gullible souls?

No, this isn’t a column about whatshisname, the guy on Twitter, who’s getting plenty of attention. It’s about Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House.

Whatever happens in the House and the Senate, however, there’s no question that the A.H.C.A. is one of the worst bills ever presented to Congress.

It would deprive tens of millions of health insurance — the decline in the number of insured Americans would be larger than what would result from simple repeal of Obamacare! — while sharply raising expenses for many of those who remain. It would be especially punitive for lower-income, older, rural voters.

In return, we would get a small reduction in the budget deficit. Oh, and a tax cut, perhaps as much as $1 trillion, for the wealthy.

This is terrible stuff. It’s made worse by the lies Mr. Ryan has been telling about his plan.
He claims that it would lower premiums; it would actually increase them. He claims that it would end the Obamacare death spiral; there isn’t a death spiral, and his plan would be more, not less, vulnerable to a vicious circle of rising premiums and falling enrollment.
Some people seem startled both by the awfulness of Mr. Ryan’s plan and by the raw dishonesty of his sales pitch. But why? Everything we’ve seen from Mr. Ryan amid the health care debacle — everything, that is, except the press coverage — has been completely consistent with his previous career. That is, he’s still the same guy I wrote about back in 2010, in a column titled “The Flimflam Man.” . . . all of these proposals share a family resemblance: Like his health plan, each involved savage cuts in benefits for the poor and working class, with the money released by these cuts used to offset large tax cuts for the rich. All were, however, sold on false pretenses as plans for deficit reduction.

So how did Mr. Ryan reach a position where his actions may reshape the lives of so many of his fellow citizens, in most cases very much for the worse? The answer lies in the impenetrable gullibility of his base. No, not his constituents: the news media, who made him what he is.

You see, until very recently both news coverage and political punditry were dominated by the convention of “balance.” This meant, in particular, that when it came to policy debates one was always supposed to present both sides as having equally well-founded arguments. And this in turn meant that it was necessary to point to serious, honest, knowledgeable proponents of conservative positions.

Now, however, the flimflam has hit a wall. Mr. Ryan used to be able to game the Congressional Budget Office, getting it to produce reports that looked to the unwary like proper scores of his plans, but weren’t. This time, however, he couldn’t pull it off: The C.B.O. told the devastating truth about his plan, and his evasions and lies were too obvious to ignore.

This false symmetry — downplaying the awfulness of some candidates, vastly exaggerating the flaws of their opponents — isn’t the only reason America is in the mess it’s in. But it’s an important part of the story. And now we’re all about to pay the price.

The Silence and Moral Bankruptcy of Paul Ryan

Yes, Donald Trump and his Cabinet nominees to date are very frightening individuals. Never in my life time with the possible exception of Richard Nixon have such delusional and/or extreme individuals been about to take power in America.  I remain convinced that the results will be disastrous for many citizens, including the angry white cretins who voted for Trump and the GOP to protect their white privilege without realizing they were cutting their own economic throats.  But just as scary, in my view, is Paul Ryan who has cultivated a reputation with a press corps that is just as vapid and easily fooled as Trump's angry white voters.  The man often wears his Catholicism on his sleeve, yet other than his opposition to abortion and gay rights, Ryan's goals and policies are diametrically opposed to the Catholic Church's social gospel.  He wants to take away health care coverage for millions, he wants to gut Medicare into an inadequate voucher program, he wants to gut Social Security, and he's in bed with Christofascist extremists many of whom are anti-Catholic.  Yet the idiots in the media still project an image of Ryan as principled and thoughtful.  Compatred to what?  One of Hitler's henchmen?  A column in the New York Times rightly takes Ryan to task.  Here are excerpts:

Paul Ryan has long been cast as Congress’s Boy Scout: earnest, honest and brimming with the best intentions, whether you agree with his proposals or not.

Donald Trump is putting an ugly end to that.

Or, rather, Ryan himself is, with his example of utter submission to Trump. Other Republicans are looking to the speaker of the House for guidance on when to confront the president-elect and when to let his craziness go unchecked. And Ryan is charting the wrong course.

I’m referring to his recent “60 Minutes” interview, the apotheosis of all of his tongue biting and conscience snuffing to date. In particular I mean the part when he was asked about Trump’s reckless — and wholly unsubstantiated — tweet that millions of Americans had voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.

“I’m not really focused on these things,” Ryan said, all too blithely. Then: “I have no knowledge of such things. It doesn’t matter to me.”

Such things? Was he at a tea in the Cotswolds, discussing the pesky upkeep of the carriage house?

Doesn’t matter? No, I guess a president-elect’s effort to undermine Americans’ confidence in our political system — and, beyond that, his attachment to conspiracy theories — aren’t pressing concerns. My bad for assuming otherwise.

Ryan’s answer was marginally better than the one given on the ABC News show “This Week” by Mike Pence, who described Trump’s tweets as “refreshing.” An adjective’s connotations can change from era to era as a language evolves, but I still associate “refreshing” with lemonade and dips in the sea, not wild accusations of voter fraud.

Pence, of course, is Trump’s designated sycophant. That’s practically written into a vice president’s job description. Ryan has no similar duty, just a growing willingness to part ways with principle.

But they can’t afford to stay mum when Trump, merely to stroke his own ego and assert his potency, tells a lie about election results, calling Clinton’s advantage in the popular vote a sham. Certainly Ryan can’t, because he’s a role model and because this lie epitomizes Trump’s demagogic tendencies and legitimizes fake news, the dark consequences of which are becoming ever clearer.

The disregard for truth — and indulgence of fantasy — among people at the pinnacle of power right now is chilling. Beyond Trump there’s Michael Flynn, his nominee for national security adviser, who has tweeted pure bunk about Clinton’s ties to pedophilia and money laundering.

On the subject of Trump, Ryan has spoken out of so many sides of his mouth that it’s less an oval than an octagon at this point. Last spring he even affirmed his endorsement of Trump while calling him out for racism. Behold leadership at its most gelatinous.

Trump is giving a green light to kooks and the finger to the dignity that Americans rightly expect of a president and that Ryan should demand of him.

Ryan is sacrificing too much for too little, and it’s time he rummaged through his wobbly endoskeleton and made fresh acquaintance with his spine. 

Resisting Paul Ryan and the GOP's Plan to Kill Medicare

Like so many other Republicans, Paul Ryan likes to talk about his supposed Christian values even as his political agenda is diametrically opposed to Christian social gospel, especially that of the Roman Catholic Church to which Ryan falsely claims to have allegiance.   As frustrating as Ryan's hypocrisy is, the laziness and gullibility of much of the mainstream media is in some ways worse as Ryan is continually allowed to maintain his war on average Americans largely without challenge and much deserved criticism.  Hopefully, this will change as the public is dragged kicking and screaming to focus on Ryan and the GOP's plan to destroy Medicare as part of the overall effort to take from the poor and give to the wealthiest individuals.  A piece in Esquire looks at the need to oppose this plan and to expose the true ugliness of Ryan and his cohorts.  Here are article excerpts:

I also believe that the attempts by the Republican majority in the Congress to dismantle Medicare and replace it with a half-filled bowl of sour porridge is both the most important issue on which to stand against what's coming and the most politically potent one, as well.

You may recall that C-Plus Augustus [George W. Bush] —having been re-elected by a margin of 35 electoral votes in 2004, and I didn't remember that it had been that close—decided that he had accrued enough "political capital" to monkey around with Social Security. That attempt got body-slammed and its defeat started the downward spiral of his approval ratings from which he never recovered fully.

This same thing should happen as regards any attempt by Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, to enact his golden dream of demolishing safety-net programs that he believes make old people with Medicare less "free" than old people who slowly waste away in darkened apartments. His idea is to set up a program with criminally inadequate vouchers, slap the name "Medicare" on it, and hope that people are as stupid as he thinks they are.

For progressives of any stripe, Medicare has to be a bright, hot line. One of the great triumphs of progressive government in the 20^th century was its virtual elimination of hopeless poverty among the elderly. Because of Medicare, and Social Security before that, old people were freed up to have the opportunity to consider their quality of life, rather than living from one can of catfood to another. And there was no more shame in them than there was in young Paul Ryan when he was living off Social Security survivor benefits after the death of his father. (You're welcome, by the way.) There can be no backsliding on this one, no attempts to "work across the aisle," no appeals to "civility" or "bipartisanship." Loyalty to Medicare has to be a defining characteristic of a Democratic politician and any Democratic politician who doesn't like it deserves to be primaried out of office.

There was a ray of hope on Tuesday that seemed to indicate that the Democratic caucus is coming to this realization as well.  Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana, who's not anyone's idea of a progressive firebrand, came out and said he would not be voting for Price's confirmation specifically because of Price's record on Medicare.

"Tom Price has led the charge to privatize Medicare, and for this reason, I cannot support his nomination. I am ready to work with anyone who wants to improve access to quality health care for Hoosier families and seniors, but the nomination of Tom Price would put us on a direct path to end Medicare as we know it, which would raise health care costs and break a fundamental promise to seniors. I have fought to protect Medicare, and I will continue to oppose efforts to privatize Medicare or turn it into a voucher program." . . . . If my colleagues have pragmatic ideas that strengthen Medicare, reduce the costs of care, crack down on waste, fraud and abuse, count me in, but if they want to phase out Medicare, or privatize the system, count me out." Nobody has a mandate to bring about this kind of destructive change. Not a president-elect with two million fewer votes than the person he ran against, and certainly not some guy who represents 230,000 people in the First Congressional District in Wisconsin. This is the gurney on which to ride to glory.

There are times that I am surprised that Ryan doesn't just come out and propose euthanizing the non-wealthy elderly.  In Ryan's world, they offer nothing to the billionaire set, so why not just eliminate them.  Ryan would have thrived as a Nazi as he pushed programs to eliminate those who were inconvenient.  The man is a foul individual and the media MUST stop fawning over him. 

 

Will Trump Be Paul Ryan's Undoing?

As regular readers know, I loath Paul Ryan and view the man as a phony when it comes to professed religious belief and nowhere near the policy wonk that the mainstream media likes to pretend.  The GOP agenda that Ryan promotes is the antithesis of the Catholic social Gospel that Ryan pretends to respect.  Meanwhile, his budget proposals are little more than a warmed over version of Ronald Reagan's trickle down economics which did not work in the 1980's and will not work now.  Despite these failings in morality and truth and veracity, Ryan is treated as the best thing to come to the GOP in decades.  Fortunately, now, Ryan's waffling self-prostitution to Donald Trump may be the root of his undoing.  The Trumpkins simply are not buying in to Ryan's smoke and mirrors bullshit.  At least that is the premise of a piece in Think Progress.  Here are highlights:

Paul Ryan . . . . was supposed to be the GOP’s conquering hero. He is the architect of the Republican Budget, a general so beloved he persuaded 235 elected lawmakers to fall in line — marching together behind legislation that would phase out Medicare.

Though Ryan was, ostensibly, second fiddle to Mitt Romney, the GOP’s most influential minds spoke of the blue-eyed congressman as the One True King. According to Republican Überlobbyist Grover Norquist, the country needs only to “pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen” because that president’s one job would be signing “legislation that has already been prepared” — Paul Ryan’s legislation.

Ryan was the agenda setter. The mastermind. The man with the plan to unravel the New Deal and nuke the Great Society from orbit.

And then, the GOP’s rank-and-file got other ideas . . . . . According to one recent poll, 58 percent of Republican primary voters view Ryan at least somewhat unfavorably. Though the Speaker has an almost mystic ability to seduce GOP elites and inside-the-beltway reporters with those dreamy blue eyes, he has lost the confidence of his party’s voters.

There are, of course, many factors that contributed to Ryan’s collapse. His gutless response to Trump’s racism and sexism is certainly one of them. . . . . He waited to see which way the wind would blow. And he is now alone, at home neither with the Trump loyalists nor with the Never Trumpers.

Setting aside his failed effort to privatize Social Security, George W. Bush understood that the portion of the Republican base most likely to rally behind a candidate like Trump is also quite pleased with programs like Medicare. It explains why he signed Medicare Part D into law.

[W]hile the last several decades of American politics have largely been a fight between movement conservatism and Rooseveltian liberalism, a different kind of politics — openly racist while simultaneously generous to voters in the in-group — was a major player in U.S. elections for many years. Southern racists ranging from “Pitckfork” Ben Tillman to Jimmy Byrnes to George Wallace promised a mixture of government largesse for white people and oppression for African-Americans.

The spirit of George Wallace lives today in Donald Trump, whose explicit racism is paired with far less enthusiasm for tearing up the American safety net than many of Trump’s fellow Republicans. Paul Ryan, by contrast, hung his career on a proposal to repeal and replace Medicare with a voucher system that provides inferior benefits to seniors at a higher price. This proposal is wildly unpopular. Even self-identified Republicans prefer Medicare to Ryan’s vouchers by a 2 to 1 margin.

Ryan’s full budget package, which also includes cuts to programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps that ethnocentric whites may be more inclined to support that his voucher program, is so unpopular that only a minority of Republican donors support it.

Ryan rallied his party behind a wildly unpopular agenda. He did so at the very moment that the GOP’s white nationalist faction was on the rise. And his signature proposal is especially likely to pique that faction’s legitimate desire to protect its own economic safety net.

If the polls are correct, it now appears that Ryan has wound up with the smaller piece of the Republican pie. That’s not a happy position for him if he wants to remain speaker — or even if he wants to remain relevant as a thought leader within the GOP.

The GOP’s alliance between Wallace ethnocentrists and movement conservatives was never inevitable. And now it may be falling apart thanks to Ryan’s miscalculation.

Why Paul Ryan Needs to Denounce Trump

An op-ed in Newsweek by a former business news reporter with the New York Times is a must read. It calls on Paul Ryan to denounce Donald Trump and also goes into detail on Trump's lack of true business acumen and mental stability.  The writer calls Trump a carnival barker and rightly so.  The man is a menace and the thought of him in the White House ought to terrify every sane American.  Trump's business empire may well be propped up by Russian money and his campaign is still under the titular leadership of a man, Paul Manafort, who could well be on his way to an FBI investigation for his dealings with enemies of America in Ukraine.  Here are op-ed highlights (read the entire piece):

History rarely presents the opportunity to prove our character. Usually, we stumble through an election year, caught up in petty bickering and the occasional raging controversy that soon fades from public consciousness. . . . This is not one of those years, Mr. Speaker. These are dangerous times for America and the world. What America does in this election will affect our allies, our enemies, our children.  

We have a candidate for president from your party going so far as to suggest that “the 2^nd Amendment people” could stop a president from exercising the Constitutional powers to nominate judges. And that, an obvious suggestion for assassinating a political opponent, is just the latest and most unbelievable historical outrage.

As youths, many of us read in history books about people who stood by and allowed horrors to unfold, and assured ourselves we would have challenged demagogues, regardless of the consequences. Now we are adults and face our first real chance to prove that. And so, Mr. Speaker, I ask you—in the first of a series of open letters to you over the next few weeks about the dangers posed by Donald Trump and his many secrets—to do what you know you must: Condemn your party’s presidential candidate. Condemn Trump as someone who does not represent the values of the Republican Party nor America. Condemn him as a danger to the United States. Condemn him to show that anyone should be disqualified for the presidency if they suggest their supporters should consider murdering public officials to achieve policy goals.

Would doing this cost you your seat in Congress? Probably. But others have sacrificed far more—those crippled while fighting tyrants overseas, those who died at the hands of racists at home while pursuing justice.

Imagine how history will view you for staying silent. If Trump is elected president, you—as the most prominent leader in the Republican Party—will be responsible for his actions. You will not be able to control him, no more than his campaign team, nor his bankers, nor his business partners could control him. As someone who first covered Trump’s business dealings decades ago, I assure you that the petty bully who mocked the family of an Army vet killed in battle is not a political novice who needs only to educate himself. That hate-filled man is the real Donald Trump, the one business reporters have known for over 40 years—reckless, narcissistic, lacking all self-awareness, eager to lash out at anyone who tells him what he does not want to hear. No intervention will help . . .

In decades to come, your children and grandchildren will ask, “Why didn’t you do something?”

Some conservatives of character, like Erick Erickson, Jonah Goldberg, Max Boot, Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney, have denounced Trump. They would rather their party lose the White House in 2016 than turn America’s future over to an unstable man who could well gain access to the nuclear codes. Speaker Ryan, you and other Republicans who care about conservatism, who care about America, must set aside the petty differences that separate our nation’s great parties and join all those fighting to stop this man. Patriotism must trump tribalism.
 “The thing you don’t understand about Donald Trump is that he’s mentally ill.”   One of Trump’s most senior executives said those words to me in the summer of 1990. I knew this person was not qualified to make a clinical diagnosis, but it was disturbing that one of the developer’s lieutenants would say such a thing to a reporter and clearly mean it.
 When the inevitable occurred and Trump could not even pay the interest on his billions of dollars in debt, his lenders found themselves in an impossible position—if they demanded he make good on all the debt he had personally guaranteed, he would file for personal bankruptcy, and the financial institutions that doled out the cash to him would go under. Trump and his lenders were standing in a basement filled with gasoline, and if either lit a match, they would both burn to death. Trump did not “outsmart” his banks, as he likes to say now. He and they had been so reckless that they had to save him to save themselves.
 [T]he words that best summed up the financial nonsense that led to the bankruptcy of Trump’s businesses were uttered in the early 1990s by the dean of financial journalists, Floyd Norris. He said that someday we all would have to explain to our children and grandchildren the bizarre story of Donald Trump, how so many banks behaved so recklessly to benefit a man who was obviously little more than a carnival barker. The answer, Floyd said, was: “You just had to be there. It can’t be explained rationally.”
 Mr. Speaker, we are again having to explain the success of the carnival barker, only now he is much more dangerous. Rather than being just someone who could put legions of banks out of business, he could become president of the United States and cause incomprehensible harm. Plenty of people—including members of your own party and even psychiatrists—are saying Trump exhibits signs of mental illness, as his lieutenant told me decades ago.
 It is not too late to do the right thing. Condemn Donald Trump. Don’t be on the wrong side of history.

Will Ryan heed the call?  I doubt it.  In my view, Paul Ryan is a man who is utterly morally bankrupt. He feigns religiosity yet pushes policies that are the antithesis of the Christian message he claims to honor.  Like Trump, Ryan embodies the swamp fever and pathological lying that are synonymous with today's Republican Party.  Do NOT expect Ryan to do the right thing. 

Conservative Columnist George Will Leaves the GOP

It has been sickening to watch one Republican after another swear fealty to Donald Trump and, in the process, jettison their last shreds of decency and morality.  The Republican Party has been increasingly morally bankrupt for years what with John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 and the increasingly visible efforts of the party to bring back a new Gilded Age with all of the abuses and inequities of the first one.  A time when the lives of most Americans were counted for nothing even as the wealthy indulged themselves in lives of shocking excess and greed. Yes, many like myself and virtually all of my extended family left the GOP rather than sell our souls, far too many were content to close their eyes and deny the growing ugliness all around them.  For these people even the rise of a dangerous narcissist with fascist desires like Donald Trump proved insufficient to make them open their eyes.  Thankfully, a few now seem to be belatedly doing so.  A case in point is George Will, a man I generally have come to disagree with.  Will, in an effort to retain some shred of decency has resigned from the Republican Party and is now registered as an independent.  Huffington Post looks at Will's defection.    Here are highlights:

Longtime conservative columnist George Will is wiping his hands clean of the Republican Party. 

“This is not my party,” Will told PJ Media on Saturday. The Washington Post writer said a Democratic presidency would be better than the alternative offered by Donald Trump — who once called Will a “major loser.”

Will, who writes for the Washington Post, acknowledged it is a “little too late” for the Republican Party to find a replacement for Trump but had a message for Republican voters.

“Make sure he loses,” Will said of the presumptive GOP nominee. “Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House.” 

His voter registration in Maryland has now changed from Republican to “unaffiliated,” PJ Media reported. The final straw was House Speaker Paul Ryan‘s (R-Wis) endorsement of Trump, he said. 

In the meantime, Trump continues to fumble over himself. Just this week, he fired his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski before setting off to Scotland to promote his golf resorts. 

“He had one good day because he didn’t vomit all over himself and gave a decent speech,” GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak said of Trump. 

I find it interesting that it was Paul Ryan's endorsement of Trump that was the final straw for Will.  I have long found Ryan to be morally bankrupt and an utter hypocrite as he claims to be a deeply religious Roman Catholic even as he pushes an agenda that is the antithesis of Catholic social teaching.  Taking from the poor and giving to the rich has no place in the Gospel message.  Ditto for leaving poor working families to slowly die in the gutter.  In his own way, Ryan is every bit as evil as Trump.  The only difference is that unlike the ego driven Trump who has a tempestuous love affair with himself each day, Ryan knows what he is doing and simply doesn't care about the less fortunate or those who the GOP finds to be "other." 

Paul Ryan Proves He is Despicable and Endorses Trump

As long time readers know, I hold a very low opinion of Paul Ryan, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Not only has long endorsed "reverse Robin Hood" policies that would take from the less fortunate and give to the wealthy, but the man was a complete hypocrite as he spoke of his Christian faith even as the policies he pushed were the antithesis to the Gospel message of the New Testament.  Now, Ryan has proven that he is an utterly craven whore - the nastiest sleazy prostitute has more integrity than Mr. Ryan, in my view - and endorsed Donald Trump for the presidency.  The Washington Post has rightly lambasted Ryan in a main editorial.  Here are highlights (I am truly ashamed that I was ever a Republican in light of what the party has become):

AS DONALD Trump was building a campaign on lies, bigotry, insults, fear mongering and unreason, a few Republican leaders of apparent principle offered some resistance. Foremost among them was House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). In March, Mr. Ryan insisted that “all of us as leaders can hold ourselves to the highest standards of integrity and decency” and that “we shouldn’t accept ugliness as the norm.”

On Thursday Mr. Ryan capitulated to ugliness. It was a sad day for the speaker, for his party and for all Americans who hoped that some Republican leaders would have the fortitude to put principle over partisanship, job security or the forlorn fantasy that Mr. Trump will advance a traditional GOP agenda.

[T]he speaker said that conversations with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee have reassured him. Mr. Trump will help turn House GOP ideas into law, Mr. Ryan said, in a way that a President Hillary Clinton would not.

This is fanciful, as Mr. Ryan must understand. Judging by his wild swings of position over the years, Mr. Trump does not believe in much of anything. The convictions that he does hold — against free trade and U.S. leadership abroad, for dividing the nation by religion and ethnicity — are antithetical to the principles Mr. Ryan has said guide him.

Having secured the nomination without Mr. Ryan’s help, a President Trump certainly would not feel bound by any assurances that Mr. Ryan believes he has heard from the candidate.

Now Mr. Ryan has endorsed a man whose “solutions” include banning Muslims from entering the country, who casts aspersions on judges because of their ethnicity, who mocks people with disabilities, who lies repeatedly, who would muzzle the free press. Each one of these is disqualifying — particularly for anyone who believes in conducting the nation’s politics in a constructive, reasonable manner or who claims to have the long-term interests of the nation, rather than a short-term win at the ballot box or in Congress, in mind.

[S]ome insisted that the speaker had little choice. This is false. “My dad used to say, ‘If you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem,’ ” Mr. Ryan said in March. When he has a comparable conversation with his children, how will Mr. Ryan explain the decision he made in this campaign?

I suspect that Ryan's children are either as self-centered hypocrites as their father or that they have figured out that their father is an unprincipled political whore who makes tawdry  prostitutes look virtuous.  Ryan has certainly proved that he cares nothing for principle, decency or the American people.

Paul Ryan: I'll Be Speaker But Only If the Neanderthals Supports Me

I have no love for Paul "Reverse Robin Hood" Ryan.  That said, the man isn't stupid (even if he is otherwise horrible) since he has told the House Republicans that he will throw his hat into the ring for the position of Speaker of the House only if all of the elements of the Republican conference support him.  Ryan has no desire to step into the nightmare that drove John Boehner into resigning.  The big question, therefore, is whether or not the lunatic Christofascist/Tea Party elements of the House GOP will swear fealty to Ryan.  Ryan has given them until Friday to decide.  Politico looks at the ongoing circus within the Republican Party.  Here are excerpts:

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, who for years has resisted a move into House Republican leadership, said Tuesday night he would serve as House speaker if he is the party's "unity candidate."

Ryan, the Ways and Means Committee chairman, wants to know by Friday if the 247 members of the House Republican Conference support him. If not, he is "happy" to continue as chairman of the powerful tax-writing panel, the 45-year-old lawmaker said.

The Wisconsin Republican laid out a series of "requests" to his GOP colleagues on Tuesday night, including a demand that the major factions within the Republican Conference endorse him before he agrees to seek the speakership. Ryan is clearly trying to shift the onus of his decision onto the House Freedom Caucus, a group of hardline conservatives that repeatedly sought to undermine Speaker John Boehner.

Ryan wants the group to refrain from any attempts to remove him from the speaker's chair if he makes a decision they disagree with, though it's not at all clear Freedom Caucus will agree.

"I have left this decision in their hands, and should they agree with these requests, then I am happy and I am willing to get to work."

Ryan added: "This is not a job I ever wanted or I ever sought. I am in the job I've always wanted here in the Congress. I came to the conclusion that this is a very dire moment, not just for Congress, not just for the Republican Party, but for our country. I think our country is in desperate need of leadership."

Ryan described himself as "reluctant" to be speaker and said there were some parts of the job he dreaded. But he said would take on the post if the three major groups inside the GOP conference — the Republican Study Committee, the moderate Tuesday Group, and the Freedom Caucus — all endorse him by Friday.

Ryan also wants Republicans to alter the procedure for "vacating the chair," which is essentially a referendum to remove the speaker from office. Conservatives threatened to force such a vote against Boehner earlier this summer, and Ryan believes it's destructive. 

The Wisconsin Republican is calling on the next speaker to be more visionary. Ryan agreed with Freedom Caucus members and a large bloc of the GOP in supporting changes to rules and procedures to empower rank-and-file members. But he said those decisions must be made together.

As Think Progress notes, the Neanderthals spittle flecked "real Americans" in the GOP are not reacting well to Ryan's demands:

How the Freedom Caucus, and the right-wing, is reacting to Paul Ryan’s demands

Not well.   Many members of the Freedom Caucus are already publicly rejecting Paul Ryan and his demands.

There are 40 members of the Freedom Caucus so the ultimate outcome is still in doubt. They will be under severe pressure from the Republican establishment to reverse course and support Ryan. But the early signs for Ryan are not positive.