Paul Ryan: Better Capitulate Than Never

Don't worry, peeps.  I've got this debt and DACA shit covered!

Oopsie.

Never mind.

If Republicans are surprised that Trump betrayed them, they haven't been paying attention

Paul Ryan has ridden the craven, unprincipled Randite granny-starver (h/t Brother Charlie Pierce) thing just about as far as theoretically possible.  And he managed to get as far as he has gotten becaise even back when he was just a 'lil shaver, telling bald-faced lies about his own budget numbers, he was apple of the Beltway's eye.  He was the smooth-talking, P90X wunderkind Aryan son (who knows The Maths and all of that stuff!) that David Brooks never had (from July of 2010) --

Paul Ryan, the most intellectually ambitious Republican in Congress, lavishly cites [Arthur] Brooks’s book. Over the past few years, Ryan has been promoting a roadmap to comprehensively reform the nation’s tax and welfare system. 

-- and who Mr. Brooks was sure could go on to make Political Centrist Superbabies with Barack Obama if only the two of them would heed Mr. Brooks' Sensible Centrist advice:

And despite the tough battle talk, they are combinable. At his best, Ryan wants to cleanse and rejuvenate the nation — to sweep away the special-interest sclerosis that strangles flexibility and growth. At his best, Obama wants to create a context for innovation — to employ blue-collar workers and to spur growth clusters like Silicon Valley, which, let us remember, was a magical cocktail of federal research subsidies, hippie culture, entrepreneurial daring and university settings.

But of course, Mr. Ryan's magic-math budget scams have never been anything but a political aphrodisiac engineered specifically to make Both Siderist hacks like Mr. Brooks salivate.  From Paul Krugman, in August of 2010, clearly subtweeting Mr. Brooks

Which brings me to the innovative thinker du jour: Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

...

So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power — the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes.

But they don’t. The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.

...

You see, for all of his fancy pomps and titles, Ryan is a man of simple tastes.   Since the days he was a mere barefoot boy, with cheek of tan doing keg stands with his Randite Bros at dear old Objectivist University, all he has ever wanted out of this life is drink wildly expensive wine on a lobbyist's tab, value-signal his "compassion" by fake-washing a few already clean pots at a soup kitchen, and strip million and millions of useless eaters and takers and moochers of the same government benefits that made it possible for Paul Ryan to afford to go to school and become a Randite superman in the first place.

And if the road to Galt's Gulch meant he had to bend the knee to a pig-ignorant, racist orange fire demon over and over and over and over again (NYT from last July) --

Paul Ryan’s Dance With The Donald

Among the Republicans going along with Donald Trump’s takeover of their party, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, has made a tortuous art — a zigzag of maybes, yes-buts and oh, I guess sos — of protecting his interests en route to capitulating to the inevitable at the nominating convention.

By supporting the Trump candidacy, Mr. Ryan has revealed himself to be a weak opportunist, far from the ideas man and budget wonk he made himself out to be when he secured the vice-presidential nomination four years ago. It probably hasn’t been easy to engage in the political casuistry needed to simultaneously reject and embrace Mr. Trump.

While condemning Mr. Trump’s more hateful utterances, Mr. Ryan has been careful never, ever to criticize Mr. Trump himself...

-- well Freedumb Isn't Free people!

And so, arrogantly heedless of the same lesson history has taught about tyrants over and over again, and desperate to deliver massive tax cuts to his plutocrat sponsors and a knockout punch to America's already frayed and underfunded social safety net, Paul Ryan went right on ahead and did the one thing Churchill said that one should never, ever do with a crocodile:

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

Behold, a Tip Jar!