PAUL RYAN IS RIGHT TO LEAVE NOW

…Paul Ryan, now a “Lame Duck” as the Speaker of the house.

Paul Ryan was forced to accept a President whose personal life was the antithesis of his own life.

The announcement that Paul Ryan would be leaving the House in January was a declaration that the Republican Party was now the “Party of Trump”.  It basically says that Ryan lost and Trump won….period!

The real truth is that what Ryan had been to the Republican party is no longer valid.

Republicans like Ryan, John McCain, John Cornyn, Orrin Hatch, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley, they are now the dinosaurs of the GOP.  Young Ryan was at one time the definition of the former GOP, but today he has become the personification of the party’s decline.

When Ryan came into office, he had two goals that became his siren call.  Ryan was formally driven by two priorities throughout his career.  They were, that of slashing taxes for well-to-do Americans, and for eliminating social-welfare and the nation’s safety-net programs in the name of “entitlement reform”.  For Congressman Ryan, whatever advanced these objectives was worth doing in Congress.

At one time, Ryan had also once said, that the “safety net” might “become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.”

That was back when Ryan was still a true believer in Ann Rand’s conservativism.  But he later backed away from Rand and acknowledged that the hammock was “the wrong analogy.”  However, his policies still confirmed that he never had abandoned his core faith: “If the wealthy did best when given positive incentives in the form of more money, the less fortunate needed to be prodded by less generous social policies into taking responsibility for their own fate.”

To have such strong feelings toward true conservatism, it must be very difficult to deal with protecting a chief executive that is under close inspection for possible involvement in a payoff to a porn star, and perhaps involvement with Russian interference in our election.

In announcing his retirement, Ryan was unfortunately required to repeat more than once how “grateful” he was to President Trump for creating the opportunity, as Ryan put it, “to actually get this stuff done.”

What he failed to discuss with his announcement was that the “stuff” the speaker was talking about included the corporate tax cut that caused a gigantic increase in the US deficit.  The same deficit that he had made a career out of denouncing.

So, did Ryan also actually acknowledge the trillion-dollar annual budget craters that the stated “conservative Congress and administration” created?

Not really.  All he did was give out his stock response, mourning that the Senate never approved his plans to cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Food Stamps, which is his policy translation of his well-worn phrase of “entitlement reform.”

But I do agree with some people who are admitting that if Ryan has presidential ambitions, he is certainly wise to walk away now.

Let’s face it.  The Republican majority in the House and Trump himself may well be destroyed by the president’s impulsive and many unwise decisions.  Ryan has stated that his dad died when he was 16, and he wanted more time with his kids before they left home to be on their own.  Well, his departure from Congress, will not only give him time with his family, but it will also offer him the opportunity to try to cleanse himself of the stain of the GOP’s current dishonest political moment.

And we must all be aware that in 2024, Ryan will only be 54 years old.  I would therefore guess that we haven’t seen the last of Mr. Ryan.

At this time, Ryan is heading out to the exits because he and his congressional supporter's conservatism has hit an absolute dead end.  And that’s why today we have Donald J. Trump in the White House.  It’s also why Ryan was forced to reluctantly accept a man whose statements he had once condemned as racist.  And to accept a chief executive whose personal life is the antithesis of his own life.

I would suspect that for Paul Ryan, this will be the part of his legacy that he’ll have the greatest difficulty to live down.

Copyright G.Ater  2018