More in sorrow than in anger, it would seem, the WashPost’s Dan Drezner struggles with House Speaker Paul Ryan’s puzzling tendency to say, well, to say one thing (usually decent by what one might call “Mainstream Acela” standards) and then do another (almost invariably pusillanimous1). Reviewing Paulie’s record, Dan can wonder why, since “Ryan is a wonk’s wonk and a decent human being”, he keeps doing, well, goddamn awful things!
Try reading Jonathan Chait, Dan. Or Paul Krugman. Or me! Frankly, if you think Ryan is a “wonk’s wonk”, you’re, well, you’re pretty goddamn stupid. All that Ryan really cares about is cutting taxes for the rich. For years, the Acela class has been trying to believe that Ryan is the “good Republican”. He looks so svelte! He looks like we wish we looked! He must be one of us!
But he isn’t. Ryan voted the straight Bush line when Bush was president, and voted the straight “anti-Obama” line when he was president. All of Ryan’s “budgets” have been frauds, as Chait and Krugman (and I) have said, over and over again. Ryan is always reluctantly sacrificing his virtue, reluctantly voting for all of Bush’s budget busters, reluctantly becoming Speaker (reluctantly becoming the leader of a troop of squeaking, screaming yahoos), reluctantly supporting Trump, all somehow for the “greater good”. If hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, and it is, then Paul Ryan is full of homage.
Afterwords
Dan ultimately concludes that Paulie is displaying “cowardice” by allowing himself to be bullied by Trump. But Paulie was a liar and a coward long before Trump appeared on the scene.
HIGHLY BELATED UPDATE
Well, I largely but not entirely belabored Mr. Drezner under false pretences in this piece. He did write “Paul Ryan is a wonk’s wonk and a decent human being,” but, had I been paying attention, I would have noticed that Dan was speaking, not for himself but in imitation of what Acela folks say about Paulie. So what Dan was really saying is that “if Paul Ryan is so great, why does never do anything but kneel before the throne of Trump?”, which is an excellent question. But I continue to fault Dan for not noticing, or at least not saying, that Ryan has always been a fraud, that is cowardice is nothing new, but rather the story of his life.
