Photo credit: Speaker Paul Ryan Facebook Page
It was totally predictable that when House Speaker Paul Ryan fled politics ahead of what Republicans expect to be disastrous midterm elections, the supportive media that created a fraudulent, flattering image of Ryan’s political career over the years would blame his demise on that villainous President Donald Trump. Fraudulent political careers die hard.
So there it was: Ryan, the earnest, conservative policy wonk from Wisconsin; the bright, young “ideas man” of the modern Republican Party, saw his hopes and dreams shattered when an irresponsible demagogue seized control of the party and ruined everything. But Wisconsin knows better, having witnessed Ryan’s own enormous contributions to the dishonesty and corruption of the Republican Party that led directly to the dangerous, democracy-threatening Trump presidency.
We have to start with the lying. Trump didn’t invent brazen, provable lies as a Republican tactic; he merely increased them to the torrent of a fire hose. Documented lies from Trump throughout his presidency have averaged six a day, according to Washington Post fact-checkers.
Insulting Working Class Americans
But so soon everyone forgets that at the 2012 Republican National Convention, the political speech publicly identified as containing the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations was (wait for it) Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Ryan’s most outrageous whopper insulted the memory and intelligence of working people in his hometown by blaming President Barack Obama for closing the Janesville GM plant, which happened under President George W. Bush. But haven’t politicians always lied? Possibly. But when they’re caught, they usually apologize and stop repeating those lies. The Romney-Ryan 2012 campaign publicly announced fact-checkers would not be allowed to control their campaign.
Okay, but don’t we at least have to give Ryan credit for his political integrity as one of the rare Republicans to call out Trump’s most viciously offensive actions, including his racist attack on the Mexican heritage of a judge, his savaging of grieving Muslim parents of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, his unconstitutional proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country and his obscene boast about grabbing women by their genitals?
|
|
Not at all. In fact, it didn’t take long to see just how totally lacking in integrity and how politically calculating Ryan’s magically vanishing objections to Trump really were. Those criticisms all came when Ryan, like most other Americans, assumed Trump was leading Republicans into one of the worst defeats in political history. Politico recently reported Reince Priebus, Ryan’s Wisconsin pal and then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, told him on Election Day that Trump was about to be crushed. Ryan immediately began preparing a speech denouncing Trump’s racist, unconstitutional views as a plague on the party to establish himself as the heroic white knight to lead Republicans out of the smoldering wasteland.
Shameless Enthusiasm
Needless to say, Ryan never gave that speech. But after publicly refusing to appear with Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, how in the world did Ryan ever work his way back into favor to become the president’s shamelessly enthusiastic partner working to pass the ugly Trump agenda? According to a senior Trump aide quoted in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Ryan did it the old-fashioned way: “rising to a movie-version level of flattery and sucking-up painful to witness.” Trump enjoyed watching Ryan’s humiliating bootlicking.
All that was required on Ryan’s part was admitting his entire political career had been based on a lie. Throughout his political life, Ryan’s most passionate crusade was against deficit government spending by Democrats. Ryan produced charts claiming to prove deficits had America teetering on the brink of total economic collapse. We now know Ryan’s apocalyptic warning about deficit spending was his biggest lie of all. It was just a phony cover story to justify trying to destroy health care for tens of millions of people and gut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps and any other government program that would enable ordinary Americans to survive hard times.
We know that because the only major legislation he and Trump passed was a massive tax cut for the wealthiest people in America (including, of course, themselves) creating the largest government deficits in the history of the world, which are expected to reach a trillion dollars annually by 2019 and far into the future. Ryan and Trump excused it with another outrageous lie: They claimed a tax cut the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said directed more than 80% of its benefits to wealthy corporations and billionaires (like Trump) and millionaires (like Ryan) was a middle-class tax cut.
So, is Ryan’s political career really over? Who knows? He’s lied to us about everything else. This is a handy time to hide out in Janesville to avoid the repercussions from a potential Republican bloodbath. After separating himself from the disastrous Trump presidency, yet another fraudulent version of Paul Ryan could emerge in the future to lead Republicans out of the wasteland he helped create.
You can find more coverage of Paul Ryan's retirement here.
