Pierce: Paul Ryan Will Retire as the Biggest Fake in American Politics

Paul Ryan Will Retire as the Biggest Fake in American Politics
If he hadn't done so much damage, we could laugh him off the national stage—like Joe Biden did.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
APR 11, 2018

...Instead, he’s going back to Janesville to be the Dad he’s always wanted to be, home to his 5,786-foot Georgian mansion on Courthouse Hill, and its 13 rooms, six bedrooms and seven bathrooms, the little house on the Wisconsin prairie that Ryan was able to afford because he married money, the one that’s on the National Register of Historic Places. Paul Ryan has somehow amassed a fortune of between four and seven million dollars without holding any job except “Congressman” for the past 20 years...

Now, he’s coming home to the district he’s avoided like the plague ever since the current midterm election cycle began. Last weekend, for example, he had to put his full-time Dad job on hold in order to go to Texas and raise money. I’m sure they had to drag him onto the airplane to go to Houston. I’m sure they’ll have to pry him out of the family manse to raise more money as we get closer to what may be a Republican cataclysm in November, the way they had to pry him out a couple of days ago for a quick trip to Georgia to raise some money there, too, and the way they had to pry him out to go to Savannah, or Texas.

As a longtime connoisseur of Ryan’s public fakery, I may never decide what about him I find the most nauseating—the retrograde policies that he gussies up as concern for the poor and downtrodden, or the wet-eyed phony sincerity with which he sells them. Even in his press conference on Wednesday, Ryan expressed disappointment that, in his two decades in Congress, he didn’t get to fully gut Medicaid and Social Security...

Ryan’s entire public career has been dedicated to shoving the nation’s wealth upwards and into the pockets of his donor class. It was the basis for the ridiculous reputation he built up through the years in which he was portrayed as a disinterested policy wonk, in which capacity he produced budget after budget that were chock-a-block with magic asterisks and fuzzy math, and most of which caused his Republican colleagues to hide behind the drapes when he walked down the halls.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19744805/paul-ryan-retire-2018/