Charlie Pierce nails it on past and present House Speakers

Two articles from late last week cemented why Charlie Pierce as one of the best political writers in this country. The first came on Thursday when Pierce took aim at the current House Speaker with an article titled, “Nancy Pelosi’s Leadership Now Constitutes a Constant Dereliction of Duty.”

Right now, at this very moment, the United States government is committing crimes against humanity on its southern border at the command of a certifiable vulgar talking yam. The opposition party controls exactly one center of power in the tripartite government and two seats—occasionally, three—on the Supreme Court. And under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives has chosen to do precisely squat about the situation, choosing instead to pick a fight with its youngest and most charismatic members who, by the way, are pretty much the only members of the House who have gone to see the atrocities first hand.

I tried to warn everyone that nothing good comes of spilling your guts to Maureen Dowd, but nobody listened. Instead, we have a public hooley between Pelosi and the group of left-leaning rookies made up of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tialib, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She keeps telling them to sit down and they keep telling her to get stuffed and then going down to the border to give witness to the ongoing atrocities there. I'm not seeing a lot of the Blue Dogs in Clint or McAllen. In fact, I'm not seeing the Speaker there much herself. The spat started when Pelosi, with no little reason, forced a vote on a border security bill produced by the Senate. She did so on a pledge by the administration* that it would not conduct massive immigration raids all over the country. Like every other promise from this administration, this one didn't age well.

Pelosi resolutely refuses to consider opening even an impeachment inquiry, and Robert Mueller isn't going to force her hand next week (or the week after, apparently), either. She even announced that [Labor secretary] Alex Acosta was solely a White House problem.

"It’s up to the president, it’s his cabinet. We have a great deal of work to do here for the good of the American people and we have to focus on that.”

What in the name of Uncle Joe Cannon is that supposed to mean? Acosta is the biggest fish in the smallest barrel. How about using him to give the White House a good solid kick in the 'nads? Wouldn't that be fun, at least? More fun, anyway, than picking Twitter beefs with some of your most popular colleagues while the kids are still in cages and the raids may begin Sunday. What was once leadership now stands as constant dereliction.

Pelosi got bailed out when Acosta resigned on Friday after his failure of a press conference. But she still seems content stand by and do nothing but spew empty words and tweets while complaining about the lack of action by the White House and GOP-controlled Senate is complete buck-passing.

Worse, it plays into the GOP’s hands because it allows them to say “See the Democrats think it’s OK”, and the average dope shrugs and says “I suppose it’s OK, then.” Pelosi doesn’t get how the game is played with the lawless thugs that make up today’s GOP, and her desire to keep things “business as usual” when things are far from OK is why new leadership is badly needed for Dems in DC.

This avoidance of accountability is NOT what Pelosi was telling the American public last year.

Your Saturday Reminder: Republicans in Washington *will not* hold Donald Trump accountable. He's their guy.

We will. https://t.co/S2Ch6bFtG0

— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) September 8, 2018

Speaking of Purty Mouth Pau-LIE, Ryan has been back in the news due to his appearance in an upcoming book by Tim Alberta where Ryan whined about how Trump and his administration acted during the 2016 campaign, and after Trump took office in 2017. Pierce (who unlike Ryan, has a college degree from a university in Wisconsin and actually follows Catholic teachings) has a few more words about the ex-wunderkind from Janesville.

Charlie says Ryan is making a pathetic attempt at face-saving and “integrity” that makes him look even weaker and more dishonest than we already thought him to be….if that’s possible. And Pierce’s article claims Ryan has done "At Least as Much Damage to the Country" as Trump has.

Alberta reports that Trump berated Ryan over a 2018 spending bill because it didn’t include funding for his border wall but then said he would sign it if Ryan were to give him time to build suspense on Twitter. Ryan agreed and then publicly sang the president’s praises after the meeting….

“I told myself I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right,” Ryan recalls. “Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government . . . I wanted to scold him all the time.”

Of course, Ryan didn't do that, not because he is something of a gutless wonder, which he is, and not because he wants to run for president when the smoke clears, which he does, but because he was getting most of what he wanted. He got his abomination of a tax cut. He got the deregulations so beloved by his donor class. He got judges who will allow said donor class to pillage the American commonwealth almost at will. And, truth be told, in his career in public office, Paul Ryan did at least as much damage to the country as the president* has.

And there's the rub in all this, and a problem for the Never Trump crew which is currently engaged in trying to use the Democratic Party as a lifeboat away from the plague ship into which their own party transformed over the past four decades. It isn't going to be enough to say you're against Donald Trump. You have to turn against the policies and forces that made him inevitable. Chief among those policies is Paul Ryan's warped and laughable conception of a national economy, all those "budgets" he proposed that made actual economists fall down laughing and his fellow congresscritters hide behind the drapes when Ryan walked down the hall toward their offices. You have to throw away the magic asterisk and the Play-Doh math with which Ryan conjured up those budgets. That's the first of the 12 steps.

God be with you.

Sooo punchable.

It seems fitting in a way, as Trump exemplifies what stupid, mediocre people think a successful businessman looks like, and Paul Ryan exemplified what stupid, mediocre people thought a policy wonk sounded like. But at least Trump is so far gone mentally that he might believe his BS. What’s Ryan’s excuse?