Photo credit: Speaker Paul Ryan Facebook Page
House Speaker Paul Ryan gave his farewell address the other day ending, for now, the Wisconsin congressman’s 20-year rise in national politics. He decried the broken, outrage-fueled politics of our divisive age as if he were an innocent bystander to the corruption of the Republican Party. He wasn’t. He was a primary contributor.
Ryan’s entire political career was a dishonest, self-perpetuated myth—that he was a bright, young, conservative leader of his party, sincerely committed to reducing the cost of government while remaining a decent, socially conscious Republican earnestly searching for solutions to poverty in our inner cities. In the end, both of those political images were exposed as total fabrications, but the Washington press corps bought them for years. They described Ryan as an intellectual “policy wonk” raising alarm about deficit spending by Democrats that had the nation on the brink of economic collapse. Ryan was the original prophet of apocalyptic American carnage.
Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times and actual Nobel Prize-winning economist, was one of the few to call out Ryan as a fraudulent flimflam man. Ryan dishonestly manipulated numbers to justify Republican attempts to dismantle Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, to oppose growing political pressure for health care reform to end bankrupting medical expenses and denial of insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. Krugman noted the draconian House budgets passed by Ryan did little to reduce deficits. They proposed cruelly slashing spending for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and other programs assisting struggling Americans and funneling most those savings into large tax cuts for the wealthy.
Ryan and the Deficit
Here’s everything you need to know about the myth of Ryan the Deficit Slayer. Under President Obama, in the five years before Ryan became House Speaker, the federal deficit fell every year. When Ryan rose to speaker in October 2015, the annual deficit was $438 billion. After three years under Speaker Ryan, the annual deficit this year is $779 billion. Next year, it will be $1 trillion. And that’s just the beginning of the coming escalation from the enormous Republican tax cut for the wealthy expected to add $1.5 to $2 trillion to the nation’s total debt over the next 10 years. Large tax cuts for the wealthy have always been Ryan’s first priority.
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Ryan promoted his other self-created myth, that he somehow actually cared about poor people, with one highly publicized tour of impoverished urban neighborhoods in 2010. You probably remember all the major legislation Ryan introduced after that tour increasing family-supporting jobs and equal employment to rebuild inner cities. You don’t? Neither does anybody else. What people remember are all those cruel budget cuts aimed at the poorest Americans. Ryan believed if poor people received government assistance to survive, they would loll around in hammocks without looking for work.
Of course, when there aren’t any jobs at all in a community, looking can be futile. That was true in most communities when President Obama was elected in 2008 amid the nation’s second worst economic crisis in US history. That didn’t stop Ryan and other Republicans from fighting to block Obama’s desperately needed $787 billion economic stimulus program creating jobs to put millions of Americans back to work. Call them un-American, sure. But Republicans didn’t want a successful economic recovery by a Democratic president to ease the misery of millions of unemployed workers. His re-election would be assured.
Failing to Call Trump a Liar
The 2012 Republican presidential campaign against Obama was a turning point for Ryan and for Republicans, but not in a good way. Many believe President Trump’s endless torrent of obvious lies is his own unique Republican innovation. The Washington Post invented the Bottomless Pinocchio to describe the brazen lies Trump repeats 20 or more times after they’ve been proven false.
But it’s Ryan, Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, who should be recognized as the Republican who opened the floodgates. Ryan’s convention acceptance speech was the high point of his career, what one reporter described as “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.” Proud hometown supporters watching had to be embarrassed by Ryan attacking Obama for closing the Janesville GM plant when everyone in town knew it closed in June 2008 under President Bush. Intentional, incessant lying has been acceptable Republican political rhetoric ever since.
Whatever credit Ryan once received for his pre-election dance about whether to support the dangerously ignorant, unfit, racist Trump for president has vanished with Ryan’s humiliating sucking up to Trump as president to achieve what’s always been dearest to both of their hearts—ever bigger tax cuts for millionaires (like Ryan) and billionaires (like Trump).
May the mythological Paul Ryan now vanish along with everything he’s done to help degrade the Republican Party into an embarrassment to democracy.
