OK, Paul Ryan is messing with our heads, although “messing” isn’t really the word I want to use.

You see, in a press conference yesterday Ryan denied that President Obama deserves credit for the economy’s growth, declaring that it was the Fed’s policies (which he then, mysteriously, described as “trickle-down economics” — which I thought Republicans favor).

So, the economy has succeeded because the Fed followed the policies that Ryan himself denounced as inflationary measures that would “debase the currency,” not to mention part of a corrupt conspiracy to bail out fiscal policy (remember, John Taylor co-authored that one).

There’s no possible way this makes sense. Even if you give all the credit to the Fed, Obama gets points for keeping people like Ryan off Bernanke’s back. Not to mention all the claims that everything Obama did was “job-killing”; if a bit of easy money is all it takes to avoid the terrible effects of “more regulations, higher taxes, more uncertainty”, then let the regulations rip!

The only way to parse this is to accept that Ryan is engaged in absurdist performance art. Either that or he thinks we’re all androids, and he’s trying to overload our logic circuits.