Ryan Shrugged
We are told by those closest to Ryan that he doesn't like politics, he's a policy guy, a serious thinker and the Speakership, which he didn't want, was always temporary. The whole "doesn't like politics" really isn't true, sure he'd like to skip glad handing and small talk and just get down to old fashioned dictatorship but hey he's stuck with what it is. For someone that doesn't like politics he sure has been at it a long time and he's only 47.
Immediately after college, where he discovered Ayn Rand, he immediately started working in politics in various legislative and speech writing positions. He ran for Congress in 1998 and has been there ever since climbing to the Chairmanship of the Budget Committee from 2011 to 2015 and then to the most coveted position in the House, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the keeper of the national purse. But then the unthinkable occurred, he had to become Speaker of the House, poor Paul. Let us also not forget that he was Mitt Romney's Vice-presidential candidate in 2012, the beautiful photogenic team, stick a pin in that because it's very important.
Let's go back a bit, who is Paul Ryan? He was born into an upper middle-class family in Wisconsin. His father was a lawyer, his mother an interior designer. Paul worked the grill at McDonalds when he was in High School, are you relating? When Paul was 16 he found his father dead in bed of a heart attack at the age of 55. From the time he was 16 to 18 Paul Ryan received a regular death benefit check from Social Security, money he saved and used to help pay for his College Education. Of course grown up Ryan sees no reason your family should get that benefit. In college he became enamored with Ayn Rand and a libertarian professor who turned him on to National Review.
In 2012 during his Vice-presidential campaign he got tired of questions about his devotion to Ayn Rand and began to pull back from his adoration, even suggesting she wasn't that important of an influence, stating instead that his religion, Roman Catholicism, was his guiding light. This in spite of the fact he he had been a key speaker at the Atlas Society, required his staffers to read the works of Rand and routinely passed out copies of Atlas Shrugged to anyone that didn't have the courage to say, no thanks. Clearly as a Roman Catholic he chooses to completely ignore the Church's teaching on Social Justice and uses only the divisive easy culture war issues to beef up his conservative cred, a no brainer for the not so free thinking.
Is Paul Ryan evil? Of course not and to suggest otherwise is ignorant and let's him off the hook. He's a royalist, small r. He and many like him believe that the country would be better off controlled by a class of nobles, he and his allies among them. He wants to eliminate all so called entitlements and social safety nets and the heaviest taxation should be on the working class, in order to maintain a mighty defense department to protect the nobles holdings. If you can make it up the greasy pole, great. If not, oh well, you just don't want it bad enough and you're probably lazy. If the image of the majority is a bunch of lazy slackers, why should government do anything to help, be it food, shelter, healthcare or education? This is the picture that modern Republicans and alleged conservatives are painting and their voters are those lazy slackers but they have convinced themselves it's the "others" rotting our Republic. The "others", so vague, so menacing, so... non-existent.
Go back to that pin. Paul Ryan will exit the House, barring some mysterious big event behind the scenes, because he has to. He has soiled himself with his sycophantic behaviour with the man baby at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He needs to enter a long political rehab to wash the stink of Trump off of his body. Mitt Romney showed Ryan the biggest what if any politician ponders, what if I were President of the United States. That is exactly what Paul Ryan now has his sites set on but he needs time. He'll run in 2024, he'll be 53, the perfect age and chances are he'll still have his boyish good looks. While he's on his long sabbatical he will never cut ties with D.C. and it's power players. His schedule will be full as he crisscrosses the country delivering speech after speech on the rubber chicken circuit outlining his vision of a better America, while also lining up a few billionaire backers that like the cut of his jib. There will also be a couple of books paying him millions and Think Tank boards paying him a couple of million more. He must run, it's now engrained in his DNA, he must know if the golden ring can be his.
In the meantime he will use 2018 to inflict as much damage to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as he can before exiting. He'll try to get full blown reform which is political ease for gut and get rid of, ironically the man who will be standing in his way is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It's not because McConnell cares about the programs, it's because he cares about holding on to legislative power and he won't let anything rock the boat during this pivotal off year election. The last thing McConnell wants is a highly motivated coalition of poor and elderly citizens marching to the polls to crush the Republicans.
What if things don't work out for Ryan's Presidential aspirations? Don't worry, he'll be okay. In addition to the millions he'll stack up during his six year hiatus he'll keep on making millions and of course that fat Congressional pension we'll be paying him the rest of his life and a benefits package worthy of a noble.
So don't you worry about Ryan, he got his and will be fine. Will you?
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