On its merits, the Farm Bill that failed to pass in the House of Representatives on Friday was a great pile of that out of which you cannot make chicken salad. It would have knuckled the poor who subsist on food stamps with work requirements that most states are not willing to pay to implement as serious policy. So, from the start, the unanimous Democratic opposition to this misbegotten lump of mucilage was virtually guaranteed. But that doesn’t make the defeat of the bill unworthy of comic chortling because, once again, we learned that Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, has all the political dexterity of a rubber mallet.

Ultimately, the bill failed because the flying monkeys of the Freedom Caucus took wing against it. They demanded some kind of hard-line immigration bill in exchange for their vote on the farm bill. (Don’t bother trying to figure it out, Jake. It’s Washingtontown.) Ryan was helpless in the face of this, because he long ago discovered that the Freedom Caucus had buried his gonads in the same potter’s field in which they buried John Boehner’s long ago.

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Ryan is an almost comically bad Speaker of the House. He has no control over his caucus and he is both unwilling and unable to cobble together any Democrats to work with him. (This, by the way, is because Nancy Pelosi is way out of Ryan’s league as a legislative politician, which is why so many Republicans are encouraging Democrats like Tim Ryan to toss her aside.) It is about at this point where we hear that poor Paul didn’t want to be Speaker in the first place, that he has heard that ol’ Rock River a’callin’ and begun a’yearnin’ for his ol’ Nationally Registered Historic Home.

He got what he came here for: a ludicrously unbalanced and economically laughable tax “reform” package that shoved ever more money upwards into the donor class for which he always has been a reliable marionette. Outside of that, the Republicans would have done better for a Speaker if they’d posted the job on Craigslist.

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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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