Ryan Lyin' Weasel

Ryan showed, too—long before Trump was taken seriously—the political possibilities available to those brazen enough to openly call large swaths of the population leeches. It is scarcely mentioned, even in criticisms of Ryan’s proposals, that his ideal policy regime, like Trump’s, would upend the lives of millions of minorities or that the project of welfare reform, which Ryan, by his own admission, signed up enthusiastically for in his youth in the late 1980s and early 1990s has historically been animated by straightforward racism. All told, Ryan’s most lasting legacy may be his role in helping the conservative movement launder its messaging against anti-poverty programs—once freighted with obviously coded tall tales about welfare queens—into tidier, more superficially respectable rhetoric…

Paul Krugman, “The Paul Ryan Story: From Flimflam to Fascism”“:

…I do have some insight into how Ryan — who has always been an obvious con man, to anyone willing to see — came to become speaker of the House. And that’s a story that reflects badly not just on Ryan himself, not just on his party, but also on self-proclaimed centrists and the news media, who boosted his career through their malfeasance. Furthermore, the forces that brought Ryan to a position of power are the same forces that have brought America to the edge of a constitutional crisis…

Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy, in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor? Remember, he voted against the Simpson-Bowles debt commission proposal not because of its real flaws, but because it would raise taxes and fail to repeal Obamacare…

So how did such an obvious con artist get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity? Basically, he was the beneficiary of ideological affirmative action.

Even now, in this age of Trump, there are a substantial number of opinion leaders — especially, but not only, in the news media — whose careers, whose professional brands, rest on the notion that they stand above the political fray. For such people, asserting that both sides have a point, that there are serious, honest people on both left and right, practically defines their identity.

Yet the reality of 21st-century U.S. politics is one of asymmetric polarization in many dimensions. One of these dimensions is intellectual: While there are some serious, honest conservative thinkers, they have no influence on the modern Republican Party. What’s a centrist to do?

The answer, all too often, has involved what we might call motivated gullibility. Centrists who couldn’t find real examples of serious, honest conservatives lavished praise on politicians who played that role on TV. Paul Ryan wasn’t actually very good at faking it; true fiscal experts ridiculed his “mystery meat” budgets. But never mind: The narrative required that the character Ryan played exist, so everyone pretended that he was the genuine article…

Paul Ryan somehow denies this, but he routinely normalized Trump and enabled his takeover of the GOP. It played out right in front of all of us. https://t.co/BAsGpI3M9L pic.twitter.com/ynltB4PpvZ

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) April 15, 2018

Matt Yglesias, at Vox, “Donald Trump sold out to Paul Ryan, not the other way around“:

I’m not a big Paul Ryan fan, but one particular kick in the pants the speaker of the House is getting on his way out the door is unfair. It’s simply not the case that he sold out to Donald Trump or compromised his principles in any way. If anything, it’s just the opposite — Trump abandoned his stated views on a wide range of policy issues in order to bring himself into close conformity with Ryan’s ideology and policy agenda…

… On substance, Trump has embraced Ryan’s vision of lower taxes on the rich and a stingier welfare state, even though he campaigned promising the opposite. Ryan has indulged Trump on a personal level without abandoning any of his longstanding policy views. It’s true that Ryan has had limited success in enacting his agenda, but the impediments there have uniformly been in the United States Senate, not the White House. If anything, the Trump administration is quite loyally plugging away at Ryan-esque goals that the president never articulated as a candidate.

But while it’s unquestionably true that the self-presentation of the GOP in 2018 and beyond looks a lot more like what Trump was doing in 2015 than what Ryan was up to three years ago, the policy agenda of the GOP hews much closer to Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” blueprint than to anything Trump said as a candidate.

The critique now, ironically, is rooted in the same style-over-substance pathologies that led so many journalists to overrate Ryan for so long — an inclination Ryan was shrewd to exploit…

Bess Levin, at Vanity Fair, “Poverty Scold Paul Ryan Retiring at 48 to Join the Ranks of Idle Rich”:

…[W]hile Ryan is leaving town after setting the Treasury on fire—something he pretended to care about under Barack Obama, when tax cuts weren’t on the line—his personal financial situation is about to get quite rosy.

Bloomberg reports that upon leaving politics, Wisconsin’s first son will have no trouble adding to a current net worth estimated at slightly more than $6 million, given the wide range of corporate boards probably already banging down his door. “The kind of board that he would go after would probably pay between $250,000 and $300,000 a year and he could probably get three or four of them,” Fred Foulkes, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, told Bloomberg. “There would be dozens that would like to have him, particularly companies that have part of their business in key relationships with certain parts of government.” While Ryan will have to abide by a rule that says representatives must wait one year between working on Capitol Hill and lobbying work, there are no such rules about joining companies’ boards. One imagines that plenty of the Speaker‘s corporate donors, now saving millions on their tax bills, would be happy to have him.

There’s some irony in the fact that Ryan, who famously called poverty a “culture problem” of “men not even thinking about working,” who said the social safety net is a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence,” and who extolled the virtues of children seeing their father working, will be quitting his job at 48 in order to do less work for more money. Corporate board seats are famously cushy gigs that involve, typically, attending a meeting every few weeks, max. By the Boston Globe’s estimates, board members usually work fewer than five hours per week per board. The positions are so lucrative and coveted that critics say some people are discouraged from raising questions about C.E.O. pay or other issues for fear of losing their seats, which we’re sure will never been an issue for the deeply principled Ryan.

While Ryan spent much of his career railing against benefits for public-sector employees, he’ll also enjoy a hefty pension package when he heads back to Janesville—a golden parachute that will be further inflated if Ryan hangs on until the end of the year, as he has said he will do…

When it came out that Trump pressured Comey to drop the Flynn investigation and then fired him when he didn’t, @PRyan excused it all saying “he’s new at this.”

Now @chucktodd asks him whether Comey is honorable, Ryan refuses to answer even on way out. He’s corrupted to the core.

— Jesse Lee (@JesseCharlesLee) April 15, 2018

But Ryan’s still got one last dream:

Paul Ryan Vows To Make Boomers Pay For Retiring By 'Fixing Entitlements' https://t.co/NCpRzEBuR6

— #TheResistance (@SocialPowerOne1) April 15, 2018