Wis­con­sin con­gress­man Paul Ryan admires Ayn Rand, and if you believe Repub­li­can Par­ty mythol­o­gy, Ryan is a mes­sian­ic John Galt who will save Amer­i­ca from a secret social­ist con­spir­a­cy. Thus, in Rand fash­ion, it’s worth ask­ing: Who Is Paul Ryan?

The GOP's presumptive vice presidential nominee is the 21st century's flesh-and-blood embodiment of political deception and media obfuscation.

The answer is sim­ple: the GOP’s pre­sump­tive vice pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee is the 21st cen­tu­ry’s flesh-and-blood embod­i­ment of polit­i­cal decep­tion and media obfuscation.

Pur­port­ing to be a small-gov­ern­ment bud­get hawk, Ryan pub­licly decries cor­po­rate wel­fare and says he wants ​“to get Wash­ing­ton out of the busi­ness of pick­ing win­ners and losers.” This has gen­er­at­ed press cov­er­age pro­mot­ing Ryan as a great fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive. Yet, writ­ten out of the sto­ry is the fact that Ryan is a Huge Gov­ern­ment Repub­li­can who vot­ed for – and in some cas­es, still defends – the biggest exam­ples of cor­po­rate wel­fare in Amer­i­can history.

Ryan, you see, was the Huge Gov­ern­ment Repub­li­can who backed this era’s mas­sive cor­po­rate bailouts–the one that picked polit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed com­pa­nies as win­ners and tax­pay­ers as losers. He was the Huge Gov­ern­ment Repub­li­can who reg­u­lar­ly vot­ed for prof­li­gate war spend­ing bills – the ones that blew a gap­ing hole in the fed­er­al bud­get. And he is the Huge Gov­ern­ment Repub­li­can now using his com­mit­tee chair­man­ship to oppose seri­ous cuts to the deficit-explod­ing cor­po­rate wel­fare still embed­ded in the bloat­ed Pen­ta­gon budget.

Sim­i­lar­ly, Ryan claims to be, and is billed in the press as, a lib­er­tar­i­an-inspired acolyte of Rand – a man who sup­pos­ed­ly val­ues free­dom and lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment. But as a Huge Gov­ern­ment Repub­li­can, he has con­sis­tent­ly vot­ed to expand the sur­veil­lance state, endorse war­rant­less wire­tap­ping and per­mit indef­i­nite deten­tion. Oh, and in con­tra­dic­tion to Rand’s writ­ings, he has also pushed to use the pow­er of Huge Gov­ern­ment to end a wom­an’s right to choose an abortion.

Like so many Repub­li­cans, Ryan gen­u­flects to the pri­vate sec­tor and insin­u­ates that the gov­ern­ment is not a job cre­ator. It’s fun­ny com­ing from a guy who has spent most of his adult life as a fed­er­al employ­ee and whose fam­i­ly’s con­struc­tion com­pa­ny brags of build­ing its for­tune off gov­ern­ment high­way con­tracts.

Ryan labels him­self an oppo­nent of ​“crony cap­i­tal­ism” and is often pro­mot­ed by reporters as some­one who can help Mitt Rom­ney thwart the Wash­ing­ton insid­ers who cor­rupt our pol­i­tics. Some­how, we are expect­ed to ignore the fact that Ryan has spent the vast major­i­ty of his adult life in Wash­ing­ton; that his wife served as a top phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and oil lob­by­ist in Wash­ing­ton; and that, as Newsweek report­ed in 2011, he tried to insert spe­cial pro­vi­sions into fed­er­al law that would boost his per­son­al oil invest­ment portfolio.

Then there are Ryan’s bud­get pro­pos­als, whose cen­tral premis­es are that Medicare must be gut­ted and Social Secu­ri­ty must be turned over to Wall Street because we alleged­ly don’t have enough rev­enue to fund them. In response, the press often cred­its Ryan’s blue­print for being coura­geous and hon­est. Yet, in the very same plans, Ryan pro­pos­es to severe­ly deplete pub­lic rev­enues by elim­i­nat­ing all tax­es on cap­i­tal gains, inter­est and div­i­dends, mean­ing that, accord­ing to The Atlantic mag­a­zine, Mitt Rom­ney would pay a 0.82 per­cent tax rate on his $21 mil­lion annu­al earnings.

Repub­li­can power­bro­kers, of course, hope you nev­er learn any of this. They hope you and an obse­quious press don’t both­er to review Ryan’s con­gres­sion­al votes or his leg­isla­tive his­to­ry. They are hop­ing, in oth­er words, that when you see Ryan’s boy­ish Mid­west­ern vis­age, you won’t see the real Ryan – and you won’t see what his ascent to vice pres­i­dent might mean for the future of America.