It has been regularly pointed out in this shebeen that Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, is, indeed, the Biggest. Fake. Ever. All along, however, I had limited that distinction to planet Earth. But after Ryan’s performing-seal act on Thursday afternoon, where he showed his Koch-upholstered arse on the subject of Devin Nunes’ phony memo, I am extending that title to include all members of the United Federation of Planets, all captive worlds in the Klingon and Romulan Empires, and every small village along the foothills of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. There’s nobody close.

Sequestered at Greenbriar in West Virginia, where the Republican congressional majorities have gone on retreat, Ryan held a press conference at which he went very long on being a very large tool. The president* already seems determined to #ReleaseTheMemo, thereby spitting in the eye of his own handpicked FBI director, and Ryan already has the back of everyone involved in the scam, no matter how laughable he appears to be in doing so.

“What this memo is, is Congress doing its job. It’s our job (to conduct oversight). This does affect our civil liberties.”

This is, of course, a joke. The memo is a carefully cherry-picked and barbered diversion, concocted by White House lawn ornament Devin Nunes, to sidetrack the Mueller investigation preparatory (I believe) to chloroforming it entirely. Congress has made no previous attempt to conduct actual oversight over the many grifts and scandals down at Camp Runamuck.

(Most recently, the Republican majorities in the Congress have been silent concerning the president*’s refusal to implement the sanctions on Russia passed by that same Congress.)

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Besides, Ryan’s record as a civil liberties champion has been heretofore well-camouflaged. Not two weeks ago, Ryan arranged for an extension of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program for another six years, and he also arranged that proposed safeguards aimed at protecting the privacy rights of American citizens failed to pass. Paul Ryan is a less of a civil libertarian than he is an economist, and that boggles the mind. Ryan also maintained that #ReleaseTheMemo was not designed as an attack on Mueller and his investigation—which is a problem because the president* already said it was.

Sit, Paul. Good boy.

Further complicating matters is the arrival on the electric Twitter machine of Junior, who is as dumb as the stump on which he once sat. He doesn't seem to understand the difference between being fired and resigning. He should learn that difference as it may come up very soon.

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It was good enough to fire McCabe, no one argues its factually inaccurate, but now days later they want to protect the names of those involved in a scandal that was big enough to fire a senior official a month before retirement? They don’t deserve a pass on that! — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 1, 2018

The Democratic leadership in the House, especially Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, was howling most of Thursday for Ryan to strip Nunes of his chairmanship. That is what a real Speaker of the House would do. (Hell, if Mr. Sam Rayburn ever had a committee chair go this far off the reservation, he’d have buried the poor bastard under the Capitol steps.) The only thing about Paul Ryan of which we can be completely certain is that he’s the Biggest Fake In The Galaxy and, as such, simply yet another performer in a malignant puppet show.



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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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