Reviews

Paul Ryan: Behind the Wizard's Screen, Not Much There

4/11/2018

Presented himself as a good man

Knows he's a very bad wizard

Financial Wiz.
Great White Hope of Middle America.
Muscles.
Character.

Paul Ryan came into our lives as the new wave. He knew how to make money for rich people, which as you know is good for all the rest of us. Then he would go off to the gym to work out.

When he wasn’t lifting weights, Ryan did a little fund-raising through his Prosperity Action group, whose biggest contributors were – why, look here – Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer, who are connected with the now-notorious Cambridge Analytica group. (Perhaps you have heard of it.)

When he is not spending quality time with his family next year, Ryan could still be handling political money – unless the Mercers are suddenly getting out of the politics game.

Either way, Ryan will slink out of daily view as a poseur who could never, ever, stand up to the disturbed man in the White House or the White Citizens Council standing mutely behind Mitch McConnell.

Ryan's announcement Wednesday makes at least 43 House Republicans who don’t want to face the voters in November – they’re not that stupid -- and senators who range from mossbunkers like Orrin Hatch, the senator from Big Pharma, to pretenders like Bob Corker, to flashes like Jeff Flake, who sometimes almost sounded like he had a clue.

You know how this began, don’t you? It began with Donald Trump (we in New York knew all about that guy) who made up stuff about Barack Obama, playing into the schemes of a patriot like McConnell who announced – announced – that his main job was to undermine the new president.

It was about race, kids. McConnell and John Boehner couldn’t stand the idea of a black man who was smarter and more graceful than they were. It’s been a project ever since – 1861 types, trying to get back to the good old days.

Paul Ryan was a good front, like a male model who wears a suit well. But his suit was made of tissue paper and it fell apart in the hard rain falling on us now. The tax cuts? The tariffs? The federal budget keeps going up and Paul Ryan is getting out of town.

On the same day that Paul Ryan announced he won't run again, the New York Times ran a great piece by Eduardo Porter on the front page of the Business section about a modest steel company that cannot compete with the killer tariffs that the disturbed man willed into being. Jobs, jobs, jobs.

(And meantime, we have a disturbed man about to deal with Syria, while pursued by the law for his real “career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks,” as the Times editorial so accurately put it.

The one thing to be said about Paul Ryan: he likes his image of a family man, a church-goer. That would account for the occasional flicker of shame on his aging face, the look that says, I could have been better than this.

Instead, Paul Ryan, new-age Republican, just quits.

Brian SAvin

4/11/2018 10:06:38 pm

Exactly who, George, do you expect this irrational rant to appeal to? You have an international audience of smart friends who won't understand anything about the details of what you allege, all of which happens to be nonsense. Who, then, is your intended audience? It is certainly not me. I know better. So do you, and I'm going to say honestly I'm certain of it. So, given that I don't regard this as in the least credible, I wonder, what is this? Is this BS a condition of your pension? Seriously, who is your intended audience for such a diatribe? It's embarrassing to everything you have stood for all these years. You spent years in Appalachia. What do you think your Appalachian friends think of this? Have some human kindness and intellectual discipline for God's sakes, please. Think about those who are hurting and need help in our nation. I do. Our President quite clearly does. Where are you on empathy, George? Enough.

George Vecsey

4/12/2018 08:29:27 am

Brian, Brian, Brian, what are we going to do?
I appreciate your liking my Mets articles and I don't want to disturb you with my real-life articles.
Here's what I propose. Do some kind of e-search on everything I write and if it comes up with "fool" or "grifter" or "Trump," skip over it. You will feel better and therefore so will I.
GV

Mendel

4/12/2018 01:58:11 pm

The Mets are not real life? Now look what you have done, Brian. I guess we can't all just get along.

Sam Toperoff

4/12/2018 01:09:11 am

He steps to the line. Takes a deep breath. Looks up at the hoop. Bends slightly. Dips and comes up. A clean release. Swish.
Good like Nedick's.
And beautifully written. Ya done real good, young'un.
Sam.

George Vecsey

4/12/2018 08:37:47 am

Merci, copain:
That is the second nicest thing you have ever said to me.
Do you remember the other? Intramural hoops. You, as a varsity player, were reffing in the quonset hut. I put a move on some guy -- left of the key, Ted Jackson kind of fake right, dribble left with left hand, get around the guy, easy layup off the boards. But before I even got off my feet, you were saying,"Great move!"
But this is second.
regards
GV

Brian Savin

4/12/2018 08:11:17 am

CBS had an wonderful interview with Gary Player at last week's Masters which would have been widely popular on the Internet had CBS not suppressed it. Player expressed shock at the treatment of the President by the mainstream media in our country. He said, he's the President, for gosh sakes. He was elected. If you don't like him, vote for somebody else next time. But have some respect. Have some respect for your country! -- Right on, Gary.

The poison oozing from once interesting pens has gone way out of bounds. The weaponizing of our justice system by the last Administration has brought us to a Constitutional crisis and it won't end nicely for those who brought us here. It can't. It's gone too far. The raid on the President's lawyer, scooping up documents at the core of attorney/client privilege, is thuggery, not the rule of law on which our country once prided itself. President Trump is the only calm in the storm of a true witch hunt.

One of the (many) good things the President has done is drive the economic troglodytes out of the Republican Party. He worked hard to reform people like Paul Ryan. Trump made clear our nation cannot cut entitlements in the current state of abject poverty and addiction to as much as half our population.

Trump fights on, and not alone. Listen to Appalachia. Listen to the brain between the two big ears of our coasts. The brain knows who cares, and who can help, and who will.

George Vecsey

4/12/2018 08:50:54 am

Brian, Gary Player is South African and has lived and worked here long enough to be entitled to his opinion.
Does this mean everybody should just shut up for four years -- including "midterm" elections - and wait for the next presidential election?
Brian, tell Gary Player it doesn't work that way here.
GV

Brian Savin

4/12/2018 09:36:26 am

Let's learn some economics: Shall we look with future hope to our young? Not so fast. Here is portion of the legacy of our President Obama:

https://qz.com/1248081/the-share-of-americans-age-25-29-living-with-parents-is-the-highest-in-75-years/

bruce

4/12/2018 12:05:25 pm

brian,

i'm outside the great republic and i understand what george--fellow commie, i guess--is on about.

i wasn't sure you did irony but after reading this in your comment, i was obviously mistaken. my apologies

.....Have some human kindness and intellectual discipline for God's sakes, please.....

have you been paying attention to what your boy has been saying for much of his public life and all of his time as candidate and potus?

seriously, have you paid ANY attention to what trump has said about individuals, ethnic groups, other countries.

the scope of his lies are extraordinary.

he lies about everything and it's so blatantly obvious i can't imagine how a bright fellow like you can overlook them.

he's like an emotional six year old with the power to kill.

on top of that he says things about ivanka that make my skin crawl.

bruce

bruce

4/12/2018 12:10:34 pm

oops IS extraordinary

George Vecsey

4/12/2018 12:08:59 pm

Brian: at the risk of sounding pompous, let's learn some history.
Something happened in 2007-8.
One could look it up on line.
I believe Barack H. Obama came into office in Jan. of 2009.
Who would pull a statistic like that to prove that Obama caused young people to live at home?
For goodness' sakes.
GV

bruce

4/12/2018 01:07:14 pm

george,

using facts is hitting below the belt.

i expected more from you.

i wanted to add one more thing from my previous reply about human kindness and intellectual discipline.

where was that when trump kept up the lie about obama being born in kenya?

i recall seeing an interview with him saying he had people in hawaii looking for proof of his foreignness. they were finding amazing things, he said.

poof. it disappeared.

he forced an apology out of those lying lips. it was mealy mouthed and he fled before taking questions.

that alone should be enough for any decent person to reject him.

and where was the outrage, vitriol and lies about guy born in canada who ran for potus against trump?

ah. he was white,.....

bruce

Gene Palumbo

4/12/2018 03:59:59 pm

Brian,

As I read your attack on George, a few lines from e. e. cummings' "I Sing of Olaf" came to mind. Treated unjustly (just as you have treated George unjustly), Olaf

"does almost ceaseless repeat
there is some shit I will not eat."

My sentiments, exactly. George shouldn't have to put up with this.

You claim that people won't understand what he's written, when in fact they'll understand it perfectly well -- as we see, for example, in Sam Toperoff's comment, posted right after yours: "Beautifully written. Ya done real good, young'un."

You ask, "What do you think your Appalachian friends think of this?" That's easy: They'll say, "You really nailed it, George."

Perhaps worst of all, you dare to call George a liar, after saying that what he wrote was "nonsense:" "I know better. So do you, and I'm going to say honestly I'm certain of it." You're certain that he knows that what he's written is nonsense, is a lie -- "BS," you call it. And that brings us to perhaps your most bizarre statement: "Is this BS a condition of your pension?" How could anyone in their right mind say that?

Finally, you assert that "Our President quite clearly does . . . think about those who are hurting and need help in our nation." What? Even people in his party and government acknowledge that his narcissism is so out of control that thinking about others is, shall we say, not exactly a priority for him.

There are limits, Brian, and this time -- even more than on earlier occasions -- you've gone beyond them. Please: fight fair.

bruce

4/12/2018 04:27:34 pm

gene,

it's not the first time brian has mentioned George's nyt pension being at risk.

i used to have a huge stack of superman comic books when i was a kid. there a superman from the bizarre world which was the opposite of our world.

I've mentioned it in comments that brian seems to live a bizarre world where up is down and down is up.

in that world trump must be telling truth.

not in ours.

bruce

bruce

4/13/2018 02:37:21 am

time for me to really retire....i just checked to see if there were any more comments before turning out the lights. i noticed i typed bizarrE world twice. it was the bizarrO world. i knew that and somehow managed to screw it up.

John McDermott

4/29/2018 08:17:39 am

He has really crossed a line this time. George is too nice, too tolerant of Brian’s rude and disrespectful personal attacks. And too nice to simply block him. Brian, who I’m sure admires George, should apologize for insulting him. I hope he does.

Brian Savin

4/12/2018 06:37:58 pm

Boys, boys, boys...and I do mean boys. I am going out to dinner. And in the morning I am going to the gym. But after that I will administer the spanking you all deserve. See you in the woodshed.
Best
Brian

Gene Palumbo

4/13/2018 12:20:53 pm

As a follow-up to George's post, I recommend a piece by (the Washington Post's) E. J. Dionne, Jr., in the current issue of Commonweal magazine. Here's a description of the piece: "Dionne
considers Paul Ryan’s announcement that he will not run for re-election in November. [He] writes, “Paul Ryan started his political life hoping to be the champion of a sunny, forward-looking conservatism. He will step down from the House speakership as the personification of conservatism’s decline.” Ryan is “very much responsible” for this decline; he led conservatives to ally with Donald Trump to pursue a bankrupt ideology.
Here's the link: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/paul-ryan’s-curdled-idealism

Brian Savin

4/13/2018 03:09:17 pm

Through George’s persistence, there seems to be no avoiding politics here, so let’s try to confront it with some degree of common understanding. I would like to urge George, and everyone who has been opining on American politics here, to recognize that an extraordinarily large part of the U.S. population suffers from one or more or all of the following: drug addition, unemployment, psychotic malaise or despondence, consuming hopelessness, poverty or near poverty, clinical depression. The factual support for that statement appears in very many forms, some of which I have put forth in my many comments. Most recently, I’ve told of some estimates that as many 40% of males aged 29-54 are out of the workforce and not accounted for in unemployment statistics. I’ve told of record numbers of our youth living at home without jobs, relationships or much hope. All of it has been substantively ignored – completely – as far as I can tell. But that is the crux of the political story of today’s United States. And that is the single-minded focus of our current President, as you will see.

The number of suffering U.S. citizens increased substantially during the years of the Obama presidency. Barack Obama had no ability to address the problem. I’m sure he wanted to help. To his credit, he tried to focus on healthcare. However, he was put up for office, and propped up, by special interests that had little interest in supporting fixes for these problems. His Presidency was designed to fix a very different problem and pursue a very different agenda:

Senator Warren wrote a book I haven’t read, but I heard her talk about it. She claimed a date that I suspect is correct: that in the late 1970’s corporations began to pool their resources to support a common political agenda. This seems to have been first the idea of their law firms, and appears to me to have centered initially out of Chicago and Washington D.C. That is the source where I encountered it, personally, in the early 1980’s. After the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, the floodgates opened and the creation of SuperPACs enabled monies to be pooled in ways even SEC regulations couldn’t trace for public companies. The participating law firms placed their enablers in corporate positions proselytizing the need for political involvement, and we seem to have gotten to an extreme point where a few major corporations became little other than giant political action committees that ran some businesses on the side.

The focus of this pooled money was national elections, at first for Congress. Neither political party was spared, but the principal focus was the Democratic Party. If these special interests gained sway over that party, the other would be easy, having a more traditional business focus. (The Tea Party movement was a difficulty for a time, but how that was overcome is another story.)

Along came William Jefferson Clinton from Arkansas, a self-promoting, oily dreamer, and his bounder of a wife from a ne’re do well Eastern family who thought she should be rich. My God, this was made to order! They were seized upon and given an agenda to promote, about how Democrats could regain political power if only they would move to the “center.” Bill Clinton, the “moderate” Democrat who appreciated capitalism! They provided him with his staff and appointments. They provided him with Lawrence Summers, with whom they practiced during the Dukakis campaign. The would-be enablers of this corporate political ascendency now also created an agenda of their own and a quite literally “golden” opportunity: the unshackling of the banking system from Depression Era regulations and the deregulation of derivatives, especially by gutting the Commodities Futures Trading Commission established under President Reagan. Summers was a one man wrecking crew. He did his job beautifully. And soon the principal focus would change from the corporate guys behind the curtain to the financial guys.

Also during all this time, the corporate agenda of getting NAFTA signed into law began to result in, as Ross Perrot warned, “a giant sucking sound” of jobs moving overseas and factories closing. Lower costs, raise profits, boost the value of those stock options!

The Internet revolution of the 1990’s created an unexpected economic boom that covered a lot of tracks. However that boom ended at the end of the millennium, when the telecom carriers, some of the largest original funders of the corporate political takeover, refused to open up their networks to the new technology. As a result the needed capital for the new companies evaporated.

All during this time, the mainstream media was an easy target. People were hired who could message reporters, and editors, and most importantly, the owners. The lure of information and party in

Brian Savin

4/13/2018 03:13:28 pm

...invitations, and hobnobbing with rich people is irresistible to most personalities in the media. I knew the routine, and knew a lot of the people. I knew how to do it. I once thought about hiring one particularly effective person I knew for work I was doing overseas when I started my own business.

The Bush years were at first non-eventful and clueless in economic terms. But the Clinton-era work of deregulating our financial system and so-called “free trade” agreements spurred runaway greed, growing unemployment and the building of an ever-taller financial house of cards. Until….kabooom!

Now what? Panic in Chicago, and New York, and Washington. Holy shit! What do we do? We can’t take a chance! We’re talking jail time, ruinous fines, sky falling. What about McCain? No, absolutely can’t trust him. It’ll probably be a Democrat. The woman? Can she win? Don’t know, let’s watch. No, she could lose to McCain. Big negatives. People are angry and want big change. I know, let’s go with the Black guy we set up with that speech. Not much experience. We’ll feed him the script every step of the way and good handlers. Get that guy Axelrod.

What happened? YES! Now let’s give him his Administration. Somebody call Larry Summers. And there’s this kid he knows, Geithner or some damn name…..

And nobody went to jail. And we doubled our national debt. And now half of our population is in a truly “deplorable” state.

One day, this big, golden-haired really smart but not always likable guy figured it out. He had been watching all this time. He spent his entire life with the working classes of every shape size and color. He builds things. He hears stories about people’s lives. He listens. He thinks government sucks in this country. He agrees with Reagan that government has been a big problem. And he thinks he can fix it. You know something, he can. He knows exactly what he is up against. It took them 40 years to build it and they won’t give it up without a fierce fight. I’m with Golden Boy, and our people. Which side are you on, boys?

And that is the true American political Rosetta Stone that informs my comments.

bruce

4/13/2018 05:06:26 pm

brian,

1) George's persistence!?...for god's sake brian, it's HIS blog. he can persist in whatever the hell he chooses.

2) quite a few conspiracy theories you have there.

3) Obama a black kid who needed to be propped up? i guess his success was because of the white people who helped him along. bogus education. low IQ (code?) not like trump who probably got into Wharton because of daddy's money. kind of infers he has a MBA. why doesn't he release his university grades at the same time he releases his much promised income tax returns?

4) are you a birther too?

5) i'm Canadian. not particularly patriotic, but my god, Justin Trudeau has never looked so good. your boy has made americans look, largely, like a nation boorish yahoos.

6) it's also shown that republicans love their party more than their country. it's exposed vast swaths of them as hypocrites--especially the born again 'folks'--who've accepted god knows how many things from trump when just one (1) of those many things would've drowned any democratic POTUS.

bruce

bruce

4/13/2018 05:13:37 pm

brian,

i forgot to mention this.

somebody should give you a swift kick in the ass for your comments about george's nyt pension being tied to what he writes on this site.

very trumpian and classless.

you should consider soiling another blog with comments like that.

bruce

Gene Palumbo

4/13/2018 07:49:34 pm

Bruce is such a careless reader. How could he have missed the best one of all? Or maybe, generous guy that he is, he was saving it for me, knowing I'd pounce on it. Anyway, check it out:

"[Trump] spent his entire life with the working classes of every shape size and color."

Of course.

"With" them as long as those of a certain "color" didn't seek an apartment in one of his buildings. See https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html

bruce

4/13/2018 08:14:04 pm

gene,

ah.

careless of me. i misread it.

i thought it said....'exploiting working classes of every race and color'....

please excuse my incorrect spelling of colour.

color is a common spelling mistake in the usa.

an epidemic in fact.

bruce

Brian Savin

4/16/2018 09:38:02 am

Two points of follow up, if I may:

1. Sometimes when our media largely ignores a really important story, and our lives in a bubble give us a false sense of reality, art can pick up the slack. Finally, some notice is being taken of the photographic art of Matt Black who is in the process of chronicling poverty across the nation in his project, the Geography of Poverty:

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/photographer-matt-black-the-geography-of-poverty/

http://www.mattblack.com/the-geography-of-poverty/

2. There is also some recent publicity being given to the return of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income. President Nixon considered it, and Melvin Laird was a strong supporter in Congress. CBS Sunday Morning brought it up this weekend. In my view, it’s always been an interesting idea in economic terms. In social terms, we already have the circus, why not pass out some bread?

There seem to be two principal negative views. One view, perhaps held by President Trump, is that we still have important work to do as a building nation and can and should get on with it without creating incentives that slow progress. Instead, we should create irresistible opportunity to participate.

The other view is articulated by our American Jeremiah, Chris Hedges. He calls it a scam that absolves political leaders of honest social responsiveness. It’s hard for me to read as one of his “reining oligarchs” is a friend of one of my children. But I get his point.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-oligarchs-guaranteed-basic-income-scam/

Again, my view is that these are the kinds of issues that demand our attention if we want to talk politics seriously and usefully.

John McDermott

4/28/2018 12:27:31 pm

Waiting for this cowardly empty suit to explain why he whacked the chaplain.

bruce

4/28/2018 03:02:48 pm

john,

i thought it was obvious.

he was preaching socialism.

the right wing in the usa--especially the born again 'folks'--all know that the big guy was a capitalist; a captain of industry who wanted every man, woman and child to support the united states of America since the world started when humanity rode on dinosaurs 6000 years ago.

bruce