“A line that will live in infamy.” That’s what Mitt Romney Republican (and former Paul Ryan Republican) Tim Alberta had to say about Paulie’s paean to Bossman Donnie, thanking the Trumpster for his “exquisite presidential leadership” when Ryan stepped down from the speakership of the House of Representatives earlier this year.
Tim Alberta studies the wreckage of his kind of Republican Party in a recent book, American Carnage, subtitled “On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.” Alberta now works for Politico but formerly wrote for such conservative outfits as the National Review and the Wall Street Journal. In his book, Alberta offers both conscious and unconscious perspective on the triumph of Trump because he’s convinced that the “old Republican Party” was the party of honor and virtue, leaving him particularly stunned by Paulie’s encomium, to the extent that poor Mr. Alberta, who once thought Mr. Ryan the epitome of Republican “values,” could do no less than paraphrase FDR and compare Ryan’s mendacious sycophancy with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Well, now Paulie has one-upped even himself, abandoning the lie that, while his entire adult career was spent in Washington, DC, his heart was always in Janesville, Wisconsin, because he’s moving his family here. Though, of course, it’s only “temporary.”
So that sob you might have heard recently if you live in DC? It was Tim Alberta’s heart breaking. Again.
Afterwords
Alberta’s self-delusion regarding Paul Ryan is monumental. Ryan played the same game as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, denouncing all government social programs, including Social Security and Medicare, as acid eating away at the heart of American greatness, “self reliance.” But in practice they only attacked programs targeted to the poor—“welfare”. If Ryan had wanted to prove that he meant what he said about reducing government subsidies, he would have proposed cutting farm price supports—welfare for the rich—but of course he never did. Alberta gives us this long song and dance about how after running for the vice presidency with Mitt Romney in 2012, Ryan went on a journey to learn about the poor, to understand their problems. So the first thing he did when he had power was to try to cut billions out of Medicaid so he could reduce taxes on the rich, something Mr. Alberta signally fails to mention. If you want to read a lot more about how terrible all Republicans are, with special attention paid to John McCain and Paulie, go here.
