So Long, Paul, It Was Not A Pleasure

The rumbling started weeks ago when the GOP rats started abandoning the ship of state known as congress (How many now? 40?), so there was no surprise when Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) announced that he was going over the side rather than endure the embarrassment of having to hand over the gavel on January 2 to a Democratic Speaker. Yes, we heard his excuse that his children are in their teens and he no longer wants to be a “weekend dad.” We can all see through that smoke. He knows that, even if he won reelection, his party would been in the minority and that is too much for this arrogant fraud to bear.

Shed no tears for the “zombie-eyed granny starver” as our witty friend Charles Pierce calls him, Ryan isn’t exactly going to the poor house. Au contraire. From Uncle Charlie:

(H)e’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.

(By the way, the Dad concerns somehow were muted back in 2012. If things had broken differently, Ryan would be in his sixth year as vice-president of the United States and, of course, he would not be planning to succeed President Romney because there would be high-school plays he couldn’t miss.)

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.

From C-SPAN:

Entitlement reform is the one thing, the one other great thing I spent most of my career working on. I’m extremely proud of the fact that the House passed the biggest entitlement reform bill in the history of the House of Representatives. Do I regret that the Senate did not pass this? Yes. But I feel, from all the budgets that I’ve passed, normalizing entitlement reform, and the House passing entitlement reform, I’m very proud of that fact. But of course, more work needs to be done. And it really is entitlements. That’s where the work needs to be done. And I’m going to keep fighting for that.

This would include, of course, “reforming,” probably out of existence, the Social Security survivor’s benefits that got him through high school and college before he could line up at the federal trough for the rest of his adult life. He is, however, very proud of the grotesque tax bill he managed to pass.

So who will replace the Fraud from Janesville? More from Charlie on the race in WI-01:

There’s a spirited Democratic primary between ironworker Randy (Iron Stache) Bryce and Cathy Myers, a member of the school board in Janesville. The only announced Republican candidate is….wait for it…a crazy-assed white supremacist named Paul Nehlen, whom Ryan crushed in a primary two years ago, and who made the news recently by being suspended by Twitter for a racist post about Megan Markle. From Newsweek:

In the tweet, he superimposed a picture on Markle’s image of the reconstructed appearance of Cheddar Man, an ancient Briton who experts now believe was dark skinned after conducting DNA tests on his 9,000-year-old remains.

It would be great if every respectable Republican in the district ran and hid and left Nehlen as the party’s standard-bearer in the race to replace Paul Ryan.

Republicans are now scrambling amongst themselves over who will take the party reins in January. There’s Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) waiting in the wings if they don’t get booted in the coming “blue wave.” but, hey, there’s always the class clowns like Steve King (R-IA) and Louie Gomert (R-TX).

Well, so long, Paul. Don’t let the door smack your derriere on the way out.