Now That The New York Times has Discovered

The smear of Ayn Rand's lipstick on Paul Ryan's political collar and the stink her ideological perfume all over his political junk:

Atlas Spurned

By JENNIFER BURNS

Published: August 14, 2012

EARLY in his Congressional career, Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin representative and presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee, would give out copies of Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” as Christmas presents. He described the novelist of heroic capitalism as “the reason I got into public service.” But what would Rand think of Mr. Ryan?

While Rand, an atheist, did enjoy a good Christmas celebration for its cheerful commercialism, she would have scoffed at the idea of public service. And though Mr. Ryan’s advocacy of steep cuts in government spending would have pleased her, she would have vehemently opposed his social conservatism and hawkish foreign policy. She would have denounced Mr. Ryan as she denounced Ronald Reagan, for trying “to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.”

Mr. Ryan’s youthful, feverish embrace of Rand and his clumsy attempts to distance himself from her is more than the flip-flopping of an ambitious politician: it is a window into the ideological fissures at the heart of modern conservatism.

Mr. Ryan is particularly taken by Rand’s black-and-white worldview. “The fight we are in here,” he once told a group of her adherents, “is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” If she were alive, he said, Rand would do “a great job in showing us just how wrong what government is doing is.”
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Rand’s anti-government argument rested on another binary opposition, between “producers” who create wealth and “moochers” who feed off them. This theme has endeared Rand, and Mr. Ryan, to the Tea Party, whose members believe they are the only ones who deserve government aid.

Yet when his embrace of Rand drew fire from Catholic leaders, Mr. Ryan reversed course with a speed that would make his running mate, Mitt Romney, proud. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he told National Review earlier this year. “Give me Thomas Aquinas.” He claimed that his austere budget was motivated by the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which holds that issues should be handled at the most local level possible, rather than Rand’s anti-government views.
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It seemed like an opportune time remind the NYT's elite readership that some of us smelly Liberals out here in East Hinterland have been hip to this aspect of Conservatism for a long, long time. From one of Digby's dozens of posts on Ayn Rand:

The Totally Awesome Ayn Rand Teen Club

by digby 

...

This [Ayn Rand] is the muse for many of the GOP leaders who pronounce themselves social conservatives.

The important point in all that is the one in which the 14 year old Nathan says that he was "hyponotized" and that Rand's novels made him feel like a hero. That's the key to Rand's influence: the people who organize their lives around Rand's overwrought philosophy are emotional adolescents and the pretense of "rationality" in her books is little more than a justification for youthful narcissism. Her own life bears this out as does the application of Randism to actual policy.

What's frightening about all this is the number of leaders who count themselves as adherents. It's common for narcissists to make it to the top of the food chain, but empowering this peculiar brand is akin to giving a 15 year old a Ferrari and a gun and taking off for the week-end. These are not people you want to put in charge of anything.

As well one of my humble efforts from 2007:

And the award for "Most Lavishly Hyperbolic Butt-Plug Ad Evah!" goes to...

These guys:

"John Galt brought the world to its knees using inner technology"?

Are you fucking kidding me?

"John Galt" is a two-dimensional, stamped-out-of-chipboard Ayn Randite protagonist whose Pimpernellian exploits on behalf of poor, oppressed capitalists are shot through a vast, steaming heap of bad science fiction called "Atlas Shrugged" like veins of undigested corn.

The book (for those of you who never strapping on the hazmat suit and Libertarian codpiece and waded into this offal ocean) is an apocalyptic novel littered with ludicrous villains, miracle metals, force fields, death rays, and magic motors that suck electricity out of the sky more efficiently than a dozen conservative ‘best selling authors” working the wingnut welfare teat.

It would be (perhaps just a little) too flip to say it plays “The Hobbit” to the “Lord of the Rings” of Tim LaHaye’s execrable “Left Behind” series, and yet they both clearly and calculatedly exploit and profit from the same basic, murderous RightWing masturbatory fantasy; they each cold-heartedly celebrate a cleansing apocalypse that allows a few of The Chosen to survive -- to be Raptured away to Heaven or the Rocky Mountains -- while civilization is annihilated and the bulk of smelly, sinful, Hippy humanity perishes for its unworthiness.

So if you really want to irritate the bejesus out of your local, smirking Objectivist wannabe, ask him (repeatedly) why Ayn Rand is lionized for doing nothing more than rewriting a secular "Book of Revelations", with more gadgets, endless “Please God, just fucking shoot me”-long tirades about Evil Collectivists and Glorious Individualismists, but no Cross.

Because, in the end, that's all it is: a pile of really, really bad science fiction.

And trying hawk your wares to the misanthropic basket cases out there who see themselves as "Ayn-Rand inspired visionaries"?

Again, are you fucking kidding me?

Trying to model your life on "Atlas Shrugged" is as emotionally healthy as trying to model a life on "Riverworld ", "Scanners Live in Vain" or "The Man in the High Castle".

Considerably less healthy, actually, since these latter are actually skillfully crafted meditations on the pain and majesty of being human…

…and not thousand-page sagas about sock-puppets stabbing straw-men with tax cuts.

As well as this a quick snip from back in April of 2012:

You Must Remember This

We'll Always Have Reagan.

Somebody finally broke it to Ayn Rand's leading Congressional Republican acolyte that the kook on whom he has based his entire public career was, well...

"Atheist?" 

"She was a fucking atheist!?"

The fact of Ayn Rand's public repudiation of the idea of God as a sign of mental illness and/or unalloyed moral depravity -- a central tenet upon which fully one-half of the corpus of Ayn Rand's philosophy rests -- and her open ridicule of people of faith apparently evaded the notice of the Republican's #1 brain wizard right up until the moment it became a political liability to his status as Jesusland's fastest rising star.
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Because I just can't help myself.