Remember when Paul Ryan was going to be the Republican ‘”alternative”? He was the guy who was going to stand aloofly aside, holding up conservative values and keeping his Ayn Rand-ian purity intact while Trump poured out a hundred conflicting promises a day. Way back … nearly six months ago. Don’t worry if you can’t remember, because Ryan clearly doesn’t recall those days of yore.

Ryan’s “hey, look over here!” press conference didn’t just deliver the first clue to finding the super-secret Obamacare replacement plan, it also gave him a chance to bury the Sessions story under such definitive arguments as this.

"We’ve never seen any evidence that an American or a member of the Trump campaign was working with the Russians."

Surely Ryan has some carefully (or less than carefully) crafted view on what “working with the Russians” means. Because there was Paul Manafort helping pro-Russian groups conduct illegal US lobbying and possibly still being paid under the table by Moscow even while working on the Trump campaign. There was Session’s pal Carter Page acting as a bridge between Trump and Russia’s state-controlled oil company. And of course there was Michael Flynn dining with Putin, briefing the Russian military on Middle East affairs, making paid appearances on Russian media, and having numerous chats with the Russian ambassador.

That’s not even including Jefferson Sessions. It’s also not including Trump’s plea for more Russian hacking, his praise of Putin, his denial of intelligence community evidence, or the numerous connections to Russian oligarchs who bailed him out of bankruptcy, propped up his company, and used Trump’s real estate connections to launder money siphoned from former Soviet states.

You might suspect that just a smidge of that has come up in those closed-door meetings with the intelligence community that Paul Ryan attends. But even that wasn’t the limit of Ryan’s stumbling silliness. He also created the narrowest rule for recusal ever created.