Ring and run, you wretched cur.

In what passes for a genuine scoop, Tim Alberta and Rachael Cade broke the news in Politico on Thursday that Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, may well be hanging them up at the end of the 2018 midterms. Of course, Ryan—and various People Who Are Familiar With His Thinking—has a number of deeply pious, and unquestionably phony, reasons for his departure.

On a personal level, going home at the end of next year would allow Ryan, who turns 48 next month, to keep promises to family; his three children are in or entering their teenage years, and Ryan, whose father died at 55, wants desperately to live at home with them full time before they begin flying the nest.

Isn’t that just too fcking sweet for words? Of course, young Paul Ryan had Social Security survivor’s benefits to live on when his pappy kicked and, once again, you’re welcome, dickhead. And I’m sure that his own children have excellent health care in his magnificent Georgian Revival home back in Janesville. I tell you, I’m almost as moved as I was when Ryan washed some clean pots and pans at that soup kitchen, or those several times when he dropped by impoverished neighborhoods in order to have his picture taken there.

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Also, I’m sure that the fact that, in 2018, all indications are that his party will be facing a bloodbath in the midterm elections, and that the abomination of a tax bill that is his crowning achievement will be one of the party’s larger millstones, have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Paul Ryan’s giant, if remarkably delicate, intellect suddenly can no longer handle the hurly-burly of everyday politics. Good god, this man could not be a bigger fake if he were made of papier-mâché.

This may be my favorite passage in the Politico account.

As the deciding votes were cast—recorded in green on the black digital scoreboard suspended above the floor—the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together. Soon he was engulfed in a sea of dark suits, every Republican lawmaker wanting to slap him on the shoulder and be a part of his moment.

His moment. Thirteen million Americans lose their health care.

Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.

His moment. Eighty-percent of the benefits going to the top one-percent.

Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.

His moment. Millions of dollars shoved upwards to people who already have billions of dollars. A deficit entering the orbit of Mercury.

Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.

His moment.

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Of course, as the piece points out, Ryan may have bigger problems completing the second part of his granny-starving exacta: shredding what’s left of the social safety net.

Reveling in the afterglow, Ryan remarked to several colleagues how this day had proven they could accomplish difficult things—and that next year, they should set their sights on an even tougher challenge: entitlement reform. The speaker has since gone public with this aspiration, suggesting that 2018 should be the year Washington finally tackles what he sees as the systemic problems with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Bear in mind: the “difficult thing” that Ryan accomplished was getting the true lunatics in his caucus to support a tax plan that is the foundation stone of a permanent corporate oligarchy, for which he and all the rest of his pack of vandals will be richly rewarded by the donor class. His biggest job as Speaker was keeping Louie Gohmert and Steve King from running amuck in their underwear. And “what he sees as being systemic problems” with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are that those programs exist at all.

Of course, he tried to do all of this while managing an existential crisis that would have embarrassed the writer’s room of Days of Our Lives.

Ryan nearly walked away from Congress once before. It was November 2012, after Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama, and the would-be vice president found himself despondent and homesick. Ryan told his wife, Janna, that he was considering retirement.

Wait a minute. He was running for a job that would have kept him in Washington for eight years—and that would’ve made him the frontrunner for the top job that would’ve kept him there for eight more—but only after he and Mitt Romney lost did he decide that Janesville and his 13 rooms were a’callin’ him home? That dog sleeps on the porch. There are those of us who recall that Ryan was such a flop on the national stage that Joe Biden laughed at him in a debate, and that he couldn’t even carry his home precinct for the ticket.

Ryan was such a flop on the national stage that Joe Biden laughed at him in a debate.

And no matter how much gauzy nonsense is spun about how reluctant he was to become Speaker, Ryan knew that the only way to maintain his utterly unearned reputation as an intellectual, while simultaneously dismantling everything about government that he opposed at a theological level, was to become the smartest chimp in the monkeyhouse. That was something he did. And now he and his owners have scored their biggest victory. People he doesn’t even know will suffer for years because Paul Ryan was Speaker of the House. People he doesn’t even know may well die because of it. But he has that one happy moment in which Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together.

Quite a trick, for an unusually sophisticated marionette.

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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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