Exactly one year ago today, Paul Ryan was riding high—higher than his college days around the frat keg as he dreamed of gutting Medicaid, and higher even than the day he posed for Time magazine pumping iron, which was clearly tough to beat given his expression throughout the shoot. The reason for Ryan’s giddiness, of course, was that Congress had just passed a “middle-class” tax bill that would disproportionately benefit the rich, i.e., one of his lifelong dreams. And with the ink barely dry on that aspiration, Ryan turned to another long-sought goal: destroying the social safety net. Practically licking his lips at the idea of slashing Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, Ryan told hosts at various news outlets that he could not imagine a better follow-up to a historic transfer of wealth thinly disguised as tax “reform” than putting the old, sick, and poor on notice. Unfortunately, Ryan‘s dream, and that of many people who simultaneously believe in corporate welfare and telling the homeless to “get a job,” did not come to pass before he announced his retirement in April, a regret that got a pointed shout-out in his goodbye speech today.

“I acknowledge plainly that my ambitions for entitlement reform have outpaced the political reality, and I consider this our greatest unfinished business,” the Ayn Rand devotee told his colleagues on Wednesday, as though he was a dying man ruing the fact that he wouldn’t live to see the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, except he was talking about slapping the blood pressure medication out of grandma’s mouth. “Ultimately, solving this problem will require a greater degree of political will than exists today. I regret that.”

Yes, leaving Congress without obliterating the social safety net will surely keep Ryan up at night for some time. Luckily, though, when things get really rough, and he wakes up in a cold sweat from a nightmare in which he almost‚ almost had the chance to kill off a busload of senior citizens but whiffed it at the last second, he’ll have something tangible to buoy him: a six-part docuseries released by his office this week detailing his 20-year quest to cut taxes on the rich, titled Decades in the Making.

Positioning Ryan like an outsider struggling against The Man, the presumably taxpayer-funded hagiography includes interviews with former staffers, Ryan’s brother, and the congressman himself about what it was like to have such an ambitious dream, and how the whole thing came together despite so many duplicitous forces working against them. Spliced together with archival footage, shadowy B-roll, and ominous music, we get quotes like, “There were times where I wasn’t sure we were going to [be able to make it happen]” and “I didn’t really believe it could get done.” If you didn’t know what they were talking about, you could be forgiven for thinking this was the inside story re: how a group of soccer players was rescued from a cave in Thailand.

Of course, nowhere in the near-20-minute homage to Ryan’s ego—which Wisconsin’s First Son promoted with a tweet claiming he’s “been fighting for comprehensive tax reform“ since the day he arrived in Washington—was there any mention of the fact that Ryan didn’t actually reform anything, settling instead for $1.5 trillion worth of tax cuts that will add to the massive debt he’s supposedly broken up about failing to tackle, and do basically nothing for the working class. To be fair, though, such asides have no place in the narrative we assume Ryan will watch exclusively while doused in KY.