CT Blue

The big news yesterday was Paul Ryan’s decision to retire so he could “spend more time with his family”, an excuse so hackneyed that it is amazing anyone still uses it, inasmuch as it is practically an admission that the actual reason is something other than a desire for familial bliss. 

Here in Southeastern Connecticut the New London Day chose to reprint a truly incredible puff piece from the Washington Post, in which once again we are asked to believe that there is a distinction between Trumpismand the standard ideology of the Republican Party. We are also treated to more of what should be the mystifying insistence on the part of the mainstream to refuse to acknowledge the fraud that Paul Ryan is and was for the entirety of his political career. That fraudulence has been extensively documented by Paul Krugman, and is well summarized here.

It will, perhaps, be the work of future historians to explain how he managed to perpetrate his fraud so successfully throughout his career.

The Post’s puff piece portrays Ryan as a reluctant Trumpie:

But the praise did little to remove the shadow Trump casts over the end of Ryan’s career now that he has decided to forego a campaign for reelection. The Trumpian revolution, which Ryan had long resisted, appeared to have claimed another victory, dispatching another occasional critic and reaffirming the president’s growing hold on a shrinking electoral coalition.

“Speaker Ryan is an embodiment of a particular kind of optimistic, pro-growth, pro-free market inclusive conservatism,” said Michael Steele, a former top adviser to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. “And that is a very different feel and tone of where the party is going under President Trump.”

In fact, once Trump was elected, Ryan jumped at the chance to use Trump and the House and Senate majorities to enact his Randian agenda, an agenda no different that Trump’s, except that it was not as explicitly racist. Of him, it can be said more truly than it could of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern that he “did make love to this employment”.

Speaking of employment, Ryan now goes to his reward. Will it be a lucrative lobbying gig, or will it more likely be a sinecure at a Koch funded “think” tank, where he will be paid for spouting earnest sounding nonsense for the remainder of his days? After all, it pays handsomely to be a Koch employee, for after retirement from Congress, where the pay is pretty good by ordinary standards, a good boy who comes through for the .01% can be assured of doing far better while doing far less. Who can blame him for hopping on the gravy train now?

By the way, I don’t really blame the idiots at the Day for going with the Post’s piece, rather than, for instance, the more balanced article in the New York Times. They have completely bought in to every mainstream meme out there, so how could they be expected to be aware that Ryan is a lying fraud? That would require a little thought and research, and that’s expecting far too much.