Listening to the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver So You Don’t Have To

 
I could stand about three minutes of Paul Ryan pontificating to Charlie SYkes about what Kevin McCarthy could do if A) he didn't remotely reassemble Kevin McCarthy and, B) if the GOP were an entirely imaginary other party instead of the shithole of bigots and imbeciles it has been for decades. 

From then on, for fear of my gorge becoming buoyant, I took it in small sips

At around the 9:30 mark, the "What's the maximum amount of revisionist bullshit we can pack into the minimum number of words" contest really takes off. 

Sykes:  So...how did we get from, say, 2015, 2014 where you... were the face of and the most well-known member of the House of Representatives?  How did we go from Paul Ryan being the face of Republicans in the House to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Ryan:  I think it's the digital age were in.  I think we have a new wing of our party.  I think the Democrats have the same thing...

The internet is to blame?  Check.

Everything bad started in 2015?  Check

Both Sides Do It?  Check.

Ryan goes on to lie about Joe Biden being exactly as bad as Donald Trump on economic issues.

Then he lies about the GOP's nearly-successful campaign to gut the Affordable Care Act, reframing it as a heroic act of deficit reduction that would have merely "reformed" the ACA.

Ryan is enough of a cold-eyed cynic to cop to the fact that Trump voters are basically brainwashed cultists who don't give a shit that Trump is a fascist or that he tried to violently overthrow the government or that he is, in a hundred other way, manifestly "unfit" to hold office.  But because, according to Ryan, Joe Biden's presidency is such an abject failure and the Democrats and the "Left" are so much worse than the imaginary Republican party which exists only in his head...it is imperative that Democrats be defeated at any cost.  

This, in turn,  means Trump must not win the GOP nomination in 2024 because he would drag the rest of the party down with him.  So opponents should stick to going after Trump as a loser and forget about going after Trump as the monster that he clearly is because the brainwashed cultists who are the base of Paul Ryan's party purely love that shit. 

Joe Biden is just as bad as Trump?  Check.

The GOP base may be brainwashed cultists...but Dems are worse? Check.

The GOP will do just fine as long as it magically transforms itself into a completely different party?  Check.

Ryan explained that he stays on the Fox News board because he wants to help Conservatism through this "moment" its having -- as if Fox had a little too much to drink and needs to be helped into a cab, or had a little fight with its roommate and needs a couch to crash on for the night, or has reaped the deranged harvest of spending a generation pandering to bigots and imbeciles and needs a Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver (h/t Brother Charlie Pierce) out there pitching woo to the crazy-but-not-quite-deep-end-of-Newsmax-crazy Republicans to keep them from scrambling down the rat-line and off this sinking ship fprever.  

Ryan explained that his fealty to the Murdoch monster factory is necessary because Murrica needs "pluralism" and Fox News must remain a bastion against the "woke" conformist commies like, well, you and me.  We who used our godlike influence over the culture to "bludgeon" others into conformity.

Sykes did point out that, um, it's actually Republican governors and legislators who are banning books and such.  Ryan allowed as how he "wasn't a big fan of that".  But, he argued, that's why you need cultural institutions like Fox News up on that wall!  Defending "natural law" (Ryan is big into "natural law") and protect us from, y'know, the same scumbags that Fox News works so hard to get elected.

Ryan explained that the only real problem with Fox News is Tucker Carlson, and Ryan is there to try to make sure all those *other* not-Tucker-Carlson voices on Fox -- the noble and completely imaginary True Conservative voices on Fox -- are protected and nurtured.

Ryan is also hopeful about the 2024 GOP primaries, because in addition to the "Trump 2.0 lane" he sees a "Reagan 2.0 lane" down which a true "classical Liberal conservative" could zoom to victory...by, uh, winning all 17 true "classical Liberal conservative" Republicans who remain in Paul Ryan's party?

We learned that Ryan apparently remains "good friends" with every Republican elected official still walking on two legs.  That Mike Pence has some great ideas about deficit reduction.  And that Fox corporation board member Paul Ryan is not going to publicly utter one mumbling word that's critical of  Rupert Murdoch's sprawing, fascist propaganda empire. 

If one is a woke Liberal troublemaker whose memory is intact, one cannot help but visualize the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver practiced this farrago of lies, deflections and rationalizations in front of a mirror one hundred times, surrounded by notecards full of talking points that had been delivered every hour on the hour by one of Murdoch's minions.

And if one is a woke Liberal troublemaker whose memory is intact, one cannot help but remember that Ryan is just one of many, many Republican ghouls and hobgoblins that Charlie Sykes, in his role as the Rush Limbaugh of Wisconsin, raised to national prominence and inflicted on our poor, wounded land.  

I tapped out once Ryan started down his labyrinthine diatribe explaining why massive corporate tax cuts would sooner or later reduce the deficit, and why the only way to save Social Security was to hand granny's Social Security check over to hedge fund managers.

Ahem.

House Speaker Paul Ryan is acknowledging "nobody knows" if the sweeping tax cuts Congress is enacting will produce enough economic growth to fend off soaring federal deficits

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) December 20, 2017

For me, this was like prematurely unearthing a time-capsule full of Ayn Rand essays and dogshit true conservative grifter double-talk that we had once hoped we would never see again in our lifetimes.  

A time-capsule that we had put in the ground for some future generation to find as they searched for answer to the question of why America went bull goose loony nuts back in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. 

I Am The Liberal Media