Rally Point Saul Newton's blog is part of our Purple Wisconsin project. Newton is the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Veterans Chamber of Commerce and a U.S. Army veteran. SHARE

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Paul Ryan has a short memory.

Less than a year ago, Congressional Republicans held the country hostage by shutting down the federal government in a desperate attempt to gut Obamacare. Congressman Paul Ryan played a key role in keeping the government shut down while millions of families across the country waited in limbo. In fact, Ryan even bragged that he was “voting to provide relief from Obamacare.”

Now, in the midst of a national tour promoting his new book, Paul Ryan tells a much different story. From the Huffington Post:

“In his new book, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) recounts shaking his head in frustration last fall as fellow Republicans sought to use a government shutdown as leverage to gut Obamacare.

“It was a suicide mission,’ Ryan writes in The Way Forward, his memoir released Tuesday. ‘This can't be the full measure of our party and our movement. If it is, we're dead and the country is lost.’

"Reflecting on the shutdown that Newt Gingrich had led in 1995, Ryan wrote of his worry about repeated missteps: ‘I saw the damage it did. We couldn't afford to take a hit like that again -- not for a strategy that had no hope of advancing our core principles."

As the article points out, this is a stark departure from what Ryan was saying during the shutdown. After the shutdown began, Ryan raised the stakes by tying shutdown negotiations to the national debt limit. An editorial he wrote for the Wall Street Journal advocated for using the shutdown to get Democrats to agree to cuts to entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.

Not only did Paul Ryan seek to use the situation to enact his extreme agenda, but actively fought to keep the government shutdown. The Washington Post reported that Ryan opposed a bipartisan Senate deal to reopen the government and end the crisis.

“According to two Republicans familiar with the exchange, Ryan argued that the House would need those deadlines as ‘leverage’ for delaying the health-care law’s individual mandate and adding a 'conscience clause' — allowing employers and insurers to opt out of birth-control coverage if they find it objectionable on moral or religious grounds — and mentioned tax and entitlement goals Ryan had focused on in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Ryan’s speech appeared only to further rile up the conservative wing of the GOP conference, which has been agitating the shutdown strategy to try to tear apart the health-care law.”

When a deal between Republicans and Democrats was finally reached, Ryan voted against it and in favor of keeping the government shut down.

The former candidate for Vice President wants people to forget the central role he has played in the budget brinksmanship from Republicans in the last four years. Apparently, Congressman Ryan’s book is historical fiction with that is short on history.

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