Paul Ryan, who tried to get Clinton’s security clearance revoked, is suddenly indifferent to huge security breaches. https://t.co/ytNTDGBJoM pic.twitter.com/PmcqVAHlQs
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) May 30, 2017
Paul Ryan's "bad faith" has been "laid completely bare…perfect symbol of the broader, corrupt bargain GOP has made with Trump" https://t.co/qCHaAcEf3o
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) May 30, 2017
Back before he enfeebled the House speakership so that President Donald Trump could run a historically corrupt administration without facing pesky oversight inquiries from Congress, Paul Ryan pretended to feel so strongly about the integrity of U.S. government secrets that he would intervene in executive branch affairs to protect it.
“Today I am writing to formally request that you refrain from providing any classified information to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the duration of her candidacy for president,” Ryan wrote last July to James Clapper, who was then the director of national intelligence, after then-FBI Director James Comey described Clinton’s handling of classified information as “extremely careless.”…
At the time, intelligence professionals professed far more alarm at the thought of Trump—erratic, impulsive, lacking any government experience—receiving classified briefings than Clinton. But Ryan inveighed against her rather than him…
… Trump’s election was a catastrophically destabilizing event in and of itself, and people like Ryan were complicit in it. But to an under-appreciated extent, the amount of damage Trump would ultimately be capable of inflicting was a question for Congress as much as Trump himself…
Paulie Blue Eyes thought he was thisclose to his kegger-day dreams of crushing all those mooching kids, crips, and oldies. But the imperious narcissist — err, Self-Made Superman — whose political train Ryan jumped aboard turned out to be just another user.
Molly Ball, in the Atlantic — “How Trump Is Torturing Capitol Hill”:
The speaker of the House strode to his lectern on a recent Thursday to confront another totally normal day on Capitol Hill: health care, tax reform, a president under investigation, rumblings of impeachment.
“Morning, everybody!” Paul Ryan chirped. “Busy week!”…
As Ryan earnestly touted his party’s work on “landmark federal IT reform legislation,” there was a grim, haunted look in his bright-blue eyes, and it wasn’t hard to imagine why. What ought to have been the salad days of Republican-led government had instead become a ceaseless, disorienting swirl of scandal, 120 days of self-inflicted chaos and crisis….Congress, Ryan insisted, was perfectly capable of doing its job. “I know people can be consumed with the news of the day,” he said, as though a potential impeachment were the latest celebrity scandal, or the time everyone was up in arms for 24 hours about avocado toast. “But we are here working on people’s problems every day. We have all these committees that do different jobs, and our job is to make sure that we still make progress for the American people, and we’re doing that. It’s just not what we’re being asked about.”…
Meanwhile Democrats sit back and watch it burn, with no small amount of schadenfreude, and the Republicans who never liked Trump see their worst predictions fulfilled. “You bought this bad pony. You ride it,” the anti-Trump consultant Rick Wilson tweeted recently. A staffer to a Senate Republican who did not vote for Trump told me, “We didn’t have high expectations, so we’re not disappointed. We tried to warn you.”
But Paul Ryan, with his long-cultivated persona as the party’s resident idealist, has always had high expectations. He watched last year as Trump ate his party; now he must watch as the president consumes his dreams. “Paul wants to govern, he’s trying to get what’s possible to get done, and he’s got a lot of credibility on the line,” Ryan’s friend Jimmy Kemp, the son of the late former Representative Jack Kemp, told me. “He’s been working on these issues for so long.”
Kemp, who wrote in Ryan’s name on his presidential ballot, described the speaker as burdened but steady. “He’s frustrated and it’s wearing on him, but he’s not throwing in the towel,” he said. “He just has to answer questions about so many things he doesn’t want to answer questions about.”…
“Resident idealist,” my fish-belly-white arse; good little Objectivist that he is, Ryan just wanted to be the sprucely-groomed funeral director at the death of the American dream. But if only people would just ask him the questions he wants to answer!
Back in April, Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkinson, “Trump Knocks the Air Out of Republicans”:
The vacuum created by an uninformed president with a policy agenda that maxed out at 140 characters “was supposed to be a feature, not a bug,” said Republican consultant Liam Donovan, via email. Donald Trump would get to tweet, and House Speaker Paul Ryan would get to determine the contours of the American future.
After 11 weeks, vacuums are breeding vacuums. The House of Representatives is riven by factions and paralyzed by Republicans’ inability to deliver on the fantastical promises made by Trump in the presidential campaign, and by Ryan and his colleagues over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency…
It’s vacuums all the way down!
Got another bit of bad news for ya, Paulie: You wouldn’t have liked Ayn Rand any more than you do Donald Trump, not even if she hit on you, as she was prone to do with the more personable young men among her deluded acolytes.
Hey @indivisible_tn & @IndivisibleTeam looks who is coming to TN to take $10k pics rather than talking with his constituents about AHCA. pic.twitter.com/szvnzAiAwD
— Gloria Johnson (@VoteGloriaJ) May 29, 2017
Open Thread: No Sympathy for the Zombie-Eyed Granny StarverPost + Comments (57)