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

Paul Ryan: Funeral For a Very Important Chimp

If they'd asked Paul Krugman, he'd have told them:

The Paul Ryan Story: From Flimflam to Fascism

...
On the other hand, I do have some insight into how Ryan — who has always been an obvious con man, to anyone willing to see — came to become speaker of the House. And that’s a story that reflects badly not just on Ryan himself, not just on his party, but also on self-proclaimed centrists and the news media, who boosted his career through their malfeasance. Furthermore, the forces that brought Ryan to a position of power are the same forces that have brought America to the edge of a constitutional crisis.

About Ryan: Incredibly, I’m seeing some news reports about his exit that portray him as a serious policy wonk and fiscal hawk who, sadly, found himself unable to fulfill his mission in the Trump era. Unbelievable.

Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy, in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor? Remember, he voted against the Simpson-Bowles debt commission proposal not because of its real flaws, but because it would raise taxes and fail to repeal Obamacare.

And his “deficit reduction” proposals were always frauds. The revenue loss from tax cuts always exceeded any explicit spending cuts, so the pretense of fiscal responsibility came entirely from “magic asterisks”: extra revenue from closing unspecified loopholes, reduced spending from cutting unspecified programs. I called him a flimflam man back in 2010, and nothing he has done since has called that judgment into question.

So how did such an obvious con artist get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity? Basically, he was the beneficiary of ideological affirmative action...

If they'd asked Brother Charlie Pierce, he'd have told them:

Once Upon A Time, There Was A Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver

I swear, it is harder to get the members of our courtier press to give up their fairy tales than it is to get someone off smack. By all reasonable measures, Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin and first runner-up in the most recent vice-presidential pageant, should be a spent force in our politics. Every time he produces a "budget," actual economists collapse in helpless laughter and other Republicans hide behind the drapes. As a vice-presidential candidate, Joe Biden made him look like a child, and Ryan was unable even to carry his own precinct for the Republican ticket. However, that is not to reckon with his army of Beltway acolytes from both sides of the aisle -- And, yes, young Ezra Klein, I am looking at you -- and their undying desire to rehabilitate their imaginary friends.

Hell, if they'd asked me I would have told them that ever since Paul Ryan came on the scene still glossy with the albumen from his Koch Brothers birthing chamber, has been a soulless, lying Randite killbot.

But the Very Serious men and women of the Beltway simply would not hear of it for the simple reason that if Ryan really was the very best GOP could field, and if he really was nothing more than a bunco artist whose basic arithmetic never fooled anyone but the rubes and the pundits, then all the scary thing the Left had been saying about the Right all along -- about the GOP being a dungheap of con-men, racists, imbeciles and lunatics coated with a thing lacquer of respectability -- might actually be...

No!No!No!No!No!   So much better and safer to chew David Brooks columns into a fine pulp --

The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.

His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to win that nomination will have to be able to talk about government programs with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. primary race.

-- stuff their ears with it, and run in circles intoning the Magic Conjure Words "Grand Bargain!" than to entertain such career-threatening heresies.

Thus is has finally, hilariously come to pass that Ryan's former hype-men --

When Ryan appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," he was interrupted several times to accept more praise. "Let us stop right now and commend him," said host Joe Scarborough, who served with Ryan in the House from 1999 to 2001. "He's in a leadership position," said New York Times financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. "He's come out with a plan, which is more than the Democrats can say."

-- who have aided and abetting him every step along the way --

“He was the great budget reformer,” Charlie Sykes, a former Wisconsin radio host and friend of Ryan’s who broke with him over the election of Donald Trump, said. “He was the guy that got the Republican Party to take entitlement reform and debt reduction seriously.”

-- have now been jammed so far into a corner of their own making that they're now making a cottage industry out of staring into the middle distance and wondering aloud --

Morning Joe rips Paul Ryan for standing by while his GOP sets fire to the Constitution for Trump

-- whatever happened to their Medicare-gutting wunderkind.

Counterposed against [Peter] Wehner’s belief that Ryan is justifiably compromising his values to support Trump is the opinion by former supporter Charlie Sykes that Ryan is infuriatingly compromising his values to support Trump. “I always imagined that there was room for an alternative conservative vision to Trumpism, and Paul Ryan was ideally suited to be that leader of a non-Trumpist conservative Republican Party, but he’s chosen not to assume that role,” Sykes tells the Times. “It’s very disappointing to see he’s become so comfortable as an ally and an enabler of Trump.” 

And so, with all the bizarre solemnity of the chimpanzee funeral in Sunset Boulevard --

-- we find those same Very Serious Beltway pundits who have been wrong all along about everything  forced to sit a very uncomfortable shiva for one more Big Lie they had all agreed to pretend was true.

This Is the Way Paul Ryan’s Speakership Ends

The Republican leader is walking away. Don’t ask him about Trump anymore.

...Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, told me that Trump and Ryan are “just wired differently, like most people are.” McCarthy, a strategic-minded operator with pillowy hair, has forged a genuine bond with Trump — arguably more so than any other lawmaker. Still, like most elected Republicans, McCarthy treads carefully, wary of poking the orange bear. It’s hard to overemphasize the degree to which Trump lives in the heads of elected Republicans. You get a sense of everyone on edge, waiting for the next tweet to drop — as if a tornado siren should accompany its arrival. When I visited McCarthy at the Capitol, the majority leader kept toggling between on and off the record. I asked McCarthy if he thought Ryan wished he could speak out more forcefully on some things the president does that might offend him.

“On the record or off the record?” McCarthy asked me.

On, I would prefer.

McCarthy paused and proceeded with care. “I think history will say that Paul spoke his own mind,” he said...

At any moment I expect to see a weepy, half-in-the-bag Peggy Noonan show up late and try to throw herself onto the casket.

He must have been a very important chimp indeed.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

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!

Paul Ryan Cannot Self-Terminate

Hillary must lower him into the steel.

If You're Not Part of The Solution...

...you're part of the precipitate.

On this Day of Capitulation, the Washington Post is having a very big sad over Paul Ryan finally selling out the tattered remnants of his principles at remaindered prices.   The WaPo finished up as follows:

...

Following Mr. Ryan’s endorsement, some insisted that the speaker had little choice. This is false. “My dad used to say, ‘If you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem,’ ” Mr. Ryan said in March. When he has a comparable conversation with his children, how will Mr. Ryan explain the decision he made in this campaign?

Whatever will Ryan tell his children?

Easy.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun...

Paul Ryan: Alas Poor Reagan, I Knew Him Well -- Update

The Hamlet of Janesville is still very busy these days wandering the halls of Congress, hiding out from his own party and talking to ghosts. So please stop asking him about how close he is to his inevitable capitulation to Il Douche:

People Mag Says Paul Ryan Insisted He Not Be Asked About Trump

A Father's Day profile of House Speaker Paul Ryan in the celebrity lifestyle magazine People portrays the lawmaker as a devoted father who takes his kids' sugar intake seriously.

But the story also contains a curious disclaimer noting Ryan requested the magazine not ask him about his party's presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, as a condition of the interview.

That disclaimer reads:

And while his job does require some weekend phone calls to take care of business, Ryan says he doesn’t want to talk politics with his kids. (Or with PEOPLE. One condition of the Speaker getting on the phone for the magazine’s special Fathers’ Day gallery was that he not be asked about his party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, whom Ryan has famously declined so far to endorse.)

When People's writer made a closing joke about Trump, Ryan responded with a chuckle, "I'm hanging up now!" before ending the call, according to the story, which ran online under the magazine's Celebrity Babies vertical...

On a golf course far away, John Boehner is working on his short game, enjoying a Rusty Nail and laughing his orange ass off.


UPDATE:

The Day of Capitulation has arrived --

I'll be voting for @realDonaldTrump this fall. I'm confident he will help turn the House GOP's agenda into laws. https://t.co/LyaT16khJw

— Paul Ryan (@PRyan) June 2, 2016

Burn, baby, burn.

@PRyan pic.twitter.com/fZLgsMBhS0

— Matt (@MattinNarberth) June 2, 2016

Paul Ryan and the Failing Sickness

So the Big City Paper sez that Paul Ryan will agree to take over as House Babysitter if the Shoutycrackers Loony Caucus agree to stop shouting and being loony.

Paul Ryan Says He Would Serve as Speaker if Republicans Unite

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and EMMARIE HUETTEMAN OCT. 20, 2015

WASHINGTON — Representative Paul D. Ryan said for the first time Tuesday that he would be willing to serve as speaker if all factions of House Republicans could unite behind him.

Mr. Ryan addressed his colleagues and called for a change to the way the job is structured, saying the speaker should be more focused on communicating the message of the party and house and less on fundraising according to members in the room. He urged members to not try and change the rules “for one group.”

...

Unfortunately, whatever other dubious charms Representative Ryan may have, he has never shown any hint of having the equipment necessary to bring knuckleheads to heel.

So good luck with that.

Meanwhile, I sincerely hope that somewhere in the West Wing of the White House,  President Barack Obama is savoring the fact that, with one sentence -- "I look forward to working closely with Representative Ryan in a cooperative and bipartisan way" -- he has the power, if he chooses to exercise it, to utterly demolish the GOP's crooked house of bullshit and dynamite.

Meanwhile, Shakespeare!

CASCA:  Why, there was a crown offered him: and being

offered him, he put it by with the back of his hand,

thus; and then the people fell a-shouting.

BRUTUS: What was the second noise for?

CASCA:  Why, for that too.

CASSIUS: They shouted thrice: what was the last cry for?

CASCA: Why, for that too.

BRUTUS: Was the crown offered him thrice?

CASCA: Ay, marry, was't, and he put it by thrice, every

time gentler than other, and at every putting-by

mine honest neighbours shouted.

CASSIUS: Who offered him the crown?

CASCA: Why, Antony.

BRUTUS: Tell us the manner of it, gentle Casca.

CASCA: I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it:

it was mere foolery; I did not mark it. I saw Mark

Antony offer him a crown;--yet 'twas not a crown

neither, 'twas one of these coronets;--and, as I told

you, he put it by once: but, for all that, to my

thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he

offered it to him again; then he put it by again:

but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his

fingers off it. And then he offered it the third

time; he put it the third time by: and still as he

refused it, the rabblement hooted and clapped their

chapped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps

and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because

Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked

Caesar; for he swounded and fell down at it: and

for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of

opening my lips and receiving the bad air.

CASSIUS:  But, soft, I pray you: what, did Caesar swound?

CASCA: He fell down in the market-place, and foamed at

mouth, and was speechless.

BRUTUS: 'Tis very like: he hath the failing sickness...

(Yes, I know that the "failing" or "falling" sickness was epilepsy, but the formation of Shakespeare's sentence here was too perfect to pass up.)

that went well pic.twitter.com/C70PglVPEb

— Peter Hamby (@PeterHamby) October 21, 2015

Who Is John Galt?

File Under: "What did Paul Ryan know about Ayn Rand and when did he know it?"

If you are unfamiliar with the name "John Galt", one wag once described him as:

"...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."

Which is, of course, unimpeachably true.

"John Galt"  is also the pivot on which Ayn Rand's infamous, behemoth novel turns, every bit as much as "What is the 'Matrix'?" drives the plot of "The Matrix" and the search for the meaning of "Catch-22" propels the book and movie of the same name.

During the novel's first 2 million pages or so, John Galt remains largely a phantom, slipping in and out of society and spiriting away it's hero capitalists, leaving behind hordes of increasingly desperate moochers and "mystics" to cry into their rapidly-souring collectivist milk. We learn somewhere along the way that John Galt was once an engineer at an automobile plant the "20th Century Motor Company"* (which I previously and mistakenly elided in my head into the "20th Century Motors Company") who (entirely on his own with no help from anyone else, thank you very much!) discovered a hitherto-unknown domain of physics, worked out all the details (again, entirely on his own) and then (after apparently mining, forging, refining, milling, stamping and tooling all the materials necessary entirely on his own) constructed a prototype engine from scratch which generated electricity literally out of thin air, thus creating -- single-handedly -- the world's first clean, portable and limitless supply of electrical power.

So far so good, right?

But then (because this is "a vast, steaming heap of bad science fiction" and not the real world) rather than ending up a celebrated multi-billionaire on the cover of every business magazine in Christendom, John Galt is instantly beset by a gang of two-dimensional, mustache-twirling villains (union thugs and "collectivists", naturally) who attempt to steal his awesome invention and treat him so rudely that instead of hanging around one minute longer (to, say, single-handedly invent a cheap box fan capable of generating the tiny breeze necessary to blow these strawmen back into the little piles of hay from whence they came), he immediately gives up on humanity generally and storms away, taking his unique knowledge of his miraculous engine with him (so complex and tricksie is it that it cannot not be understood or reverse-engineered by anyone else on Earth) and promises to "Stop the motor of the world".

(Which, when you run it through the Adolescent Boy Tantrum Translator, comes out as "I am an unappreciated genius in a world full of loser assholes who shit all over me.  Fuck you, world!", thus explaining why "Atlas Shrugged" is very popular with smart, angry adolescent boys.)

As the novel slouches ever more slouchily onward (towards Bethlehem Steel to be born, one presumes), the phrase "Who is John Galt?" (the verbal shrug of exasperated hopelessness spoken talismanically every time some poor producer gets tangled up by the incomprehensibly evil traps and snares of Big Gummint, Unions or Religion) becomes so ubiquitous that by the time one has threaded through vast armies of straw men and traversed thousands of mile of leaden prose it becomes so blindingly obvious that Answering! This! Question! is the whole point of the novel that even a skeevy collectivist parasite like me figured it out all by myself without having to ask my Communist Party handlers to explain it to me even once! 

And in the most sustained slab of screechy, pedantic, Manichean writing in the entire book, Ms. Rand helpfully answers that question.  And whether you're an acolyte who gets that dreamy, fuck-the-poor, Objectivist glint in your eye every time you think of "The Speech", or you are a normal human being who recalls it dimly as "that interminable, godawful, blunt-force-trauma screed that seemed to go on and on and hellishly on forever" it is the one part of the novel that everyone remembers.

Everyone.

(Hell, it's the primary reason why, about 10 seconds after Barack Obama took the Oath of Office, the Right whipped itself into another of their trademarked fake-apoplectic frenzies, threatening this time to "Go Galt!" by walking away and leaving their batshit blogs untenanted. Or something. According to legend this "strike" by America's leading Conservative  "producers" ended once someone explained to the likes of wingnut welfare queens such as Rich Lowry and Michelle Malkin that copying and pasting RNC talking points was not actually the same as inventing the Bessemer process or building an aircraft out of bicycle parts, sailcloth and resin.)

However, for the fusspot who lives to look things up, the specific citation is Chapter VII of Part III, entitled "This is John Galt Speaking".

The speech begins as follows --

"For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing-you who dread knowledge-I am the man who will now tell you."

-- runs on for 64 more pages, and it is why, in addition to being a two-dimensional, stamped-out-of-chipboard Ayn Randite protagonist and the pivot on which "Atlas Shrugged" turns, John Galt is also the big, shiny, public petard* tenterhook from which Paul Ryan now finds his career dangling;  the smoking-gun proof that Paul Ryan is, beyond any doubt, a first order pathological liar whose sudden, magnetic-poles-reversing-themselves denials about Ayn Rand are so...tectonic...that he genuinely "out-Herods Herod".

Or at least out-Romneys Romney.

Here is the video where Ryan publicly cuts his own throat by violating the first rule of effective lying:  keeping your damned story simple-simple-simple.

Here is a partial transcript for those who have better things to do than watch  doddering old whore Brit Hume obediently deliver his softballs by slow freight (emphasis added):

Brit Hume, FOX News: What is your view of Ayn Rand? Are you an Ayn Rand disciple?

Rep. Paul Ryan: No. I really enjoyed her novels, Atlas Shrugged in particular. It triggered my interest in economics. That's where I got into studying economics. That's why I wanted to study the whole field of economics.

I later in life learned about what her philosophy was, it's called Objectivism. It's something that I completely disagree with. It's an atheistic philosophy. But I think what she's done is she's showed -- she came from communism. She showed how the pitfalls of socialism can hurt the economy, can hurt people, families and individuals and that to me was very compelling novels. Which says freedom, free enterprise, liberty is so much better than totalitarianism and socialism. Those novels, I thought were interesting. But her philosophy, which is different, is something I just don't agree with.

And right there -- right at the point where Paul Ryan states categorically that "Atlas Shrugged" (which Paul Ryan "really enjoyed" so much that he made his staff read it and handed copies of it out as Christmas presents)  is "different" than Ayn Rand's philosophy "called Objectivism" (with which Paul Ryan "completely disagree[s]") -- is where Mr. Ryan knowingly tells what may  be the biggest and most consequential lie any Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate has told in recent memory.

It's not just that "Atlas Shrugged" was written by Objectivism's inventor and chief spokesperson.  Oh my no.  It's that the novel's philosophical apogee and most memorable element -- that deadly, long-ass "This is John Galt Speaking" slab of awful that swallows up 64 pages of its  pages -- was consciously designed by Ayn Rand to be a comprehensive introduction to her Objectivist philosophy -- a philosophy which excoriates those who claim to act out of a religious faith that teaches charity and mercy as mere dictators and degenerate "mystics" whose only "craving is to kill" and whose "only satisfaction is to torture": 

... 

“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims-as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force-he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious: reason, to him, is a means of deception, he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason-and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and press on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it. 

“Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth created by others-just as he is a parasite in spirit, who plunders the ideas created by others-so he falls below the level of a lunatic who creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others. 

“There is only one state that fulfills the mystic’s longing for infinity, non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence-and the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man’s life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it. A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other reality exists. 

“No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as ‘The People,’ no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension-in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture. 

“Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved...

Question:  How do you know this?

Answer:  Because Ayn Rand fucking well said so!   

Question: But why should we take your word for it, driftglass?  After all, isn't this just the sort of thing that a skeevy Liberal collectivist parasite such as yourself would lie about?

Answer: Well, duh!  Fortunately you don't have to take my word for it.  In fact, any idiot with a browser and access to the internet (I'm looking at you, David Gregory) can look these exciting facts up for themselves because the good people at "The Atlas Society" -- the organization to which Paul Ryan delivered the following speech in 2005 during which he explicitly states that he "goes [back to] the 64-page John Galt speech" whenever he needs to check his ideological bearings (at around the 3:30 mark) -- 



-- has an entire page devoted to painstakingly tongue-bathing John Galt's speech and explaining its Pure Objectivist Awesomeness in excruciating detail (emphasis added):

... 

In Atlas Shrugged, the hero, John Galt, makes a radio speech to the nation revealing the strike of the producers and explaining its rationale. The speech resolves the philosophical mystery of the plot: Why are the most productive people leaving their work and disappearing from society? As such, it provides a comprehensive introduction to Ayn Rand's philosophy, though one that is tailored to the events and characters of the novel. In later works, Rand presented specific elements of her philosophy in nonfiction terms.

Ayn Rand regarded Galt's speech as the shortest summary of her philosophy, which she called Objectivism. "I knew it was going to be the hardest chapter in the book," she told an interviewer in 1961. "I underestimated. I thought, with a feeling of dread, that it would take at least three months. Well, it took two years." Rand began outlining the speech on July 29, 1953; it was not completed until October 13, 1955. Her biggest challenge was not the speech's philosophical content but its literary requirements. In a novel, she could not present her ideas in the form of a dry, systematic treatise; she had to state them dramatically, in the form of a revolutionary leader's manifesto and challenge to a corrupt society.

"I started by making an outline of the issues to be covered," Rand explained. "I originally began the theoretical presentation with metaphysics, starting with existence exists, going from metaphysics to epistemology, then planning to go to morality. After writing quite a few pages, I had to stop because I knew it was absolutely wrong. That is the logical order in non-fiction, but you can't do it in fiction. The speech had to start by presenting the morality, which is the real theme of the book, and where Galt would have to begin his explanation to the world. So I had to rewrite the whole thing."

Though the speech is written as a single, continuous presentation, it can be divided into three sections. In the first, Galt presents the moral code of reason and individualism (The Morality of Life) that the producers embrace. In the second, he explains and attacks the opposite moral code of mysticism, sacrifice, and collectivism (The Morality of Death), showing how it has always been used to exploit the producers. In the third section, he explains the strategy of the strike -- the withdrawal of "the sanction of the victim" -- and urges his listeners to reexamine their moral assumptions. This section also presents the political ideals that follow from the moral code of rational individualism. 

...

Or to put in in terms any novitiate Randite would understand,  ("Atlas Shrugged" = Objectivism) as clearly and unambiguously as (A = A), and anyone who has ever read and "enjoyed" "Atlas Shrugged" and says otherwise is either a pathological liar or mentally ill.

So who is John Galt? 

Well, if we had any honest national political journalism left in this country, "John Galt" would be fiery wreck that ended Paul Ryan's public career, and the iceberg that finally sank Willard Romney's presidential dreams once and for all.

+++++++++++++++

* UPDATE:  Thank you to both people who corrected me on my use of "petard", as well as the individual who corrected me regarding John Galt's place of employment.


Why yes, the author of this post would be delighted to take your money!

On The Eve of our Great National Debate ™ Over Ayn Rand -- UPDATE

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It is helpful to remember that Paul Ryan is every bit as big a flip-flopper as Mittens. 

As Lawrence O'Donnell's video shows, Congressman Ryan has spent most of his adult life as a proud and fervent acolyte of Ayn Rand. 

The atheist, pro-abortion-on-demand-through-the-ninth-month Ayn Rand. 

The Ayn Rand who wove her deep contempt for religion and for people of faith into everything she ever wrote. 

That Ayn Rand. 

Then as his public profile began to grow with the fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-Planned Parenthood teahadist base, he did what any good Fox News Teapublican would do:

Verily I Say Unto Thee 

That this night

Before the kooks crow

Thou shalt deny me

Thrice.

Over at "The New Yorker", Jane Mayer homes in on this enormous breach in Paul Ryan's political armor. First, there are the protestations of eternal love and fidelity:

AYN RAND JOINS THE TICKET 

Posted by Jane Mayer

With the choice of Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney adds more to the Republican ticket than youth, vigor, and the possibility of carrying Wisconsin—he also adds the ghostly presence of the controversial Russian émigré philosopher and writer Ayn Rand.

Although she died thirty years ago, Rand’s influence appears on the rise on the right. As my colleague Ryan Lizza noted in his terrific biographical Profile of Ryan, Rand’s works were an early and important influence on him, shaping his thinking as far back as high school. Later, as a Congressman, Ryan not only tried to get all of the interns in his congressional office to read Rand’s writing, he also gave copies of her novel “Atlas Shrugged” to his staff as Christmas presents, as he told the Weekly Standard in 2003.

Two years later, in 2005, Ryan paid fealty to Rand in a speech he gave to the Atlas Society, the Washington-based think tank devoted to keeping Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy alive. He credited her with inspiring his interest in public service...

Later, when happy-fun-time is over and dragging her around in public becomes a liability with the people he is trying to impress, comes the breakup.

First, he stops returning her phone calls. Then he avoids her at the annual Galt's Gulch Anti-Christmas, Religion-is-for-Mentally-Ill-Parasites Party

Then, this:

More recently, however, Ryan distanced himself from Rand, whose atheism is something of a philosophical wedge issue on the right, dividing religious conservatives from free-market libertarians. This year, with his political profile rising, Ryan stressed not only that he had differences with Rand’s atheism—a point he had made as far back as 2003—but went so far as to denounce her whole system of beliefs, describing his early attraction to her writing as little more than a youthful dalliance. He admitted that he had “enjoyed her novels,” but, as Mak notes, he stressed that, “I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas

The craven Mr. Ryan has downgraded Ayn Rand -- once the love of Mr. Ryan's ideological life  -- to nothing more than a clingy weirdo with whom he once had a little strange on the side; a political embarrassment to be heaved under the bus the minute she became an inconvenience.

In Republican-speak this is known as "Pulling a Gingrich".  


UPDATE:  

To the "driftglass is bashing atheists!" persons in the comment section, point to me please where in this post I bash atheists.  

I have correctly described the opinions and beliefs of Ayn Rand as she opined and believed them.

I have pointed out that Ayn Rand's stated beliefs and opinions are diametrically opposed to the beliefs and opinions of the fundamentalist Republican Base which Mr. Ryan is now trying to court.

Have at it, and if you find my voice bashing atheists in this post I will happily issue a public apology.

OTOH, if it turns out that this is a product of your imagination, I reserve the right to hang you out as a pinata and to add the phrase "those thin-skinned, chimera-chasing atheists" to my public vocabulary :-)

Yours in Christ,

driftglass

Now They'll Have To Like Me!

Mittens feeds the beast.

From the AP:

AP source: Romney picks Ryan for running mate

NORFOLK, Va.—Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has picked Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan to be his running mate, according to a Republican with knowledge of the development. They will appear together Saturday in Norfolk, Va., at the start of a four-state bus tour to introduce the newly minted GOP ticket to the nation.
The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to disclose the decision.

In a statement issued Friday night, Romney's campaign would say only that the running mate would be revealed at 9 a.m. EDT at the Nauticus Museum. Berthed at the museum is the USS Wisconsin -- which offered a hint about Romney's choice.

Before Romney's team issued the statement, all signs seemed to point to Ryan, the seven-term Wisconsin congressman whose nomination could help assuage the conservative base of the party that has been reluctant to fully embrace Romney.
...

If the last 30 years of American political history has proven anything, it's that trying to appease the monstrous appetites of the Right only makes them exponentially hungrier and crazier.

Apparently no one affiliated with Team Romney is familiar with the story of "Little Red State Fundy".

Rough Winds Did Shake

the Randite Dudes of May/
And summer's lease had all too short a date...*
(pic originally from here)

While everyone was busy on the other side of town screaming at Barack Obama for being awful, I got a chance to slip down into David Brooks' so-called Centerbunker for a look around at what the last few months have done to the place.

It is not pretty.


Now that a few rays of sunlight have fitfully penetrated the Centerbunker's stupefying pall, and the booze and soma and NyQuil have worn off, and Our Mr. Brooks has gotten a good, clear look at the bloodthirsty conservative freak with whom he so eagerly hopped in the sack during this last Spring, his initial giggly smittenness with Galtian Superhero Paul Ryan (from Mother Jones) --

David Brooks on Paul Ryan's long-term budget proposal:

Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes....His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion....This budget tackles just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts....Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

-- seems to have faded even faster than Mr. Brooks' famously giggly smittenness with George W. Bush's epic conquest of the Sinister Swarthyfolk of Iraq:

...conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks excoriated the GOP for its intransigence. Writing yesterday that it “may no longer be a normal party” but rather a movement of “fanatic[s]” with a “sacred fixation” on tax cuts, Brooks slammed the GOP for rejecting a “no-brainer” compromise with Democrats, which would include closing tax loopholes for things like corporate jet ownership:

On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

But Brooks’ plea for sanity was lost on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who responded to the column on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show this morning. Ryan said that if Republicans gave up the loopholes now without securing a deal to lower marginal tax rates overall, they would lose an opportunity to demand new tax cuts in the future:

RYAN: What happens if you do what he’s saying, is then you can’t lower tax rates. So it does affect marginal tax rates. In order to lower marginal tax rates, you have to take away those loopholes so you can lower those tax rates. If you want to do what we call being revenue neutral … If you take a deal like that, you’re necessarily requiring tax rates to be higher for everybody. You need lower tax rates by going after tax loopholes. If you take away the tax loopholes without lowering tax rates, then you deny Congress the ability to lower everybody’s tax rates and you keep people’s tax rates high.

Yikes!

So this morning, while Our Mr. Brooks met his New York Times contractual obligation by pasted together one of his patented, non sequitur Here-is-some-stuff-I-read-about-Indian-sugar-farmers-and-a-Trenton-soup-kitchen columns (His conclusion: People are complicated! Also, Context is Important!) about which I have no specific disagreement, his heart was clearly not in punditting anymore.

Just a feeling, mind you, but one based on observing spurned lovers and broken hearts over the years that to be piddling around with such trivia while your Party is busy trying to blow up the planet strikes me as the act of someone who is now virtually catatonic from Total Ideology Fail Overload (TIFO). A sense that Mr. Brooks (like so many of his kind and class) simply cannot accept the evidence of his senses and the evidence of his own, massive failures.

As if, having watched the team for which he has been a very vocal champion and cheerleader most of his life deliberately seek out an iceberg in the open ocean into which they could deliberately ram and sink the Ship of State...

...Mr. Brooks has decided to cope with this existential collapse by climbing up on the fantail and start selling cookies.

Hey, they're really good cookies!

Wassamatta, you don't like cookies?

Anyway, this is what Our Hearbroken Mr. Brooks threw together on deadline today for public consumption.

In private, back down in the Centerbunker, things are a little more frantic.

Quickly surveying the wreckage his nights of fevered debauchery with a certain bloodthirsty Conservative freak has left in its wake, a confused and shocked David Brooks asks the basic questions.

How did this bloodthirsty Conservative freak get in here?

Why is this bloodthirsty Conservative freak's johnson jammed halfway down my throat?

Why are there Craigslist responses to some ad for "bloodthirsty Conservative freak" pasted up all over my "Bloodthirsty Conservative Freaks of 2011" calendar with careful annotations next to each one in my handwriting?

Why is there a "Find hot bloodthirsty Conservative freaks in your area" Grindr app on my iPhone?

Why am I wearing a wedding ring inscribed with the words "Mrs. Bloodthirsty Conservative Freak 4 Evah!"?

Why do I have a giant "I Heart Bloodthirsty Conservative Freaks" tattoo on my ass?

Who oh who could have permitted all of these terrible things to happen?

And, above all, will this in any way affect my earning power as the Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual in America?

To this last I can answer, quite unequivocally, "Not in the slightest. Mr. Brooks."

Not in the slightest.


* (h/t Bill Shakespeare)

GOP Congressional Members

Caucus behind closed doors with Paul Ryan to respectfully discuss the tricky position that his Bold and Serious Plan to Destroy Medicare puts them in.