Paul Ryan gets a fitting sendoff to a horrid career

As government shuts down, the feckless Wisconsinite that is the Speaker of the House of Repesentatives is the subject of a number of fitting reflections on his way out the door (and into the halls of some lobbying and wingnut welfare).

Let's start with Bill Lueders’ annual year-end “Cheap Shots” column in Isthmus.

Good Riddance Award: Paul Ryan

It was always a bit baffling why this smarmy rich kid from Janesville was seen as a rising Republican star, tapped to run for vice president and serve as speaker of the House. But there was no mystery at all why he decided not to seek reelection this fall: He knew his party was about to get clobbered in the midterms, in part because of his ineffectiveness. But Ryan’s political shortcomings are nowhere near as serious as his moral ones, from his antipathy to programs for people in need, to his pusillanimity toward Trump’s daily outrages, to his indifference to the slaughter of children in Yemen by a U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition. His chief failing wasn’t being an inept politician, but being a terrible human being.

Sooooo punchable.

And here's a great case in point, where Pau-lie makes a massive own goal with his fake and transparent attempts to show his "class" and "legacy" as he leaves Congress.

Sure - thanks for aiding and abetting their furlough, too, @SpeakerRyan https://t.co/ztBbx5lecz

— Marivic Hammond (@MsL84AD8) December 22, 2018

And here's Chris Hayes reminding us of the fiscal fraudulence of Purty Mouth Pau-lie, noting that Ryan was a partisan hack who only cared about the US budget deficit when Barack Obama was president, and stopped caring about it whenever Republicans were in power. He is then joined by Ruth Conniff of Madison's Progressive and Marquette graduate Charlie Pierce of Esquire, two people who have always seen through Ryan's flim-flam.



Let me finish with a few more words from Charlie Pierce, who has despised his fellow Irish Catholic for years, and gave Pau-lie a notorious nickname that still applies today.

Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, has spent this week bidding farewell to Our Nation's Capital, and taking both his prodigious ego, and parading the tattered remnants of his utterly undeserved reputation down the boulevards of Washington. To complete the metaphor, somebody should have walked behind him with the shovel and a bucket. Ever the charlatan's charlatan, and in keeping with the spirit of the season, his prolonged valedictory was as full of shit as the Christmas goose.

It began on Tuesday, when we all paid for a six-part miniseries on the electric Twitter machine chronicling Ryan's rise from his poor but humble origins as the scion of a family that got rich on government construction contracts, to his hardscrabble years when we all paid for his needs through the Social Security survivor's benefits he received (you're welcome again, bumblefck), to his career in politics, which latter episode contained this monumental fireworks display of unadulterated mendacity.

As a kid from Janesville, Wisconsin, I never thought I'd work on Capitol Hill, let alone be a member of Congress. I feel very blessed to have had these opportunities to make a real, positive difference in the lives of so many Americans.

Jesus H. Christ at a Friday night fish fry, is there no end to this man's utter fraudulence?

He aimed at that particular spot on earth from the time he got his first John Galt footie 'jamas. He wanted to get there so he could pull up the ladder on teenagers who suffered the same tragedy he had. He aimed himself at Capitol Hill as surely as Apollo 11 aimed itself at the moon. He’s bragged about how he used to discuss the gutting of Medicaid at his college keggers. ("Jesus, Trey. Who invited that guy? He’s bumming me out, man.") He was a star in the College Republicans and volunteered for John Boehner's campaign.

Upon graduating from Miami (O), the first thing he did was take a job in the office of then-Senator Bob Kasten of Wisconsin. So the first real permanent job he had was on Capitol Hill. Then he worked for Jack Kemp, then he worked for Sam Brownback, then he got elected to Congress and the rest is misery. I guess now we're supposed to believe that, on his way to the Parker Pen factory, he got knocked on the head, stuffed in a sack, and dropped on the sidewalk of Constitution Avenue.

Interestingly, I happened to be in Janesville with my wife and friends for their great lights display at their Rotary Botanical Gardens, and had a very good dinner at the city's Milwaukee Grill. I bet I showed up at those places last night more than Paul Ryan will in the next decade. There's no way that guy is coming back to Wisconsin to live - he is DC Swamp all the way.

Paul Ryan's career is a classic example of how media confuses "tone" with "decency", and he stayed in office because average people confuse "jargon and a convincing face" with "actual knowledge" (some nice gerrymandering after 2010 also helped).

Good riddance, indeed.