Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, has spent this week bidding farewell to Our Nation's Capital, and taking both his prodigious ego, and parading the tattered remnants of his utterly undeserved reputation down the boulevards of Washington. To complete the metaphor, somebody should have walked behind him with the shovel and a bucket. Ever the charlatan's charlatan, and in keeping with the spirit of the season, his prolonged valedictory was as full of shit as the Christmas goose.

It began on Tuesday, when we all paid for a six-part miniseries on the electric Twitter machine chronicling Ryan's rise from his poor but humble origins as the scion of a family that got rich on government construction contracts, to his hardscrabble years when we all paid for his needs through the Social Security survivor's benefits he received (you're welcome again, bumblefck), to his career in politics, which latter episode contained this monumental fireworks display of unadulterated mendacity.

As a kid from Janesville, Wisconsin, I never thought I'd work on Capitol Hill, let alone be a member of Congress. I feel very blessed to have had these opportunities to make a real, positive difference in the lives of so many Americans.

Jesus H. Christ at a Friday night fish fry, is there no end to this man's utter fraudulence?



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He aimed at that particular spot on earth from the time he got his first John Galt footie 'jamas. He wanted to get there so he could pull up the ladder on teenagers who suffered the same tragedy he had. He aimed himself at Capitol Hill as surely as Apollo 11 aimed itself at the moon. He’s bragged about how he used to discuss the gutting of Medicaid at his college keggers. ("Jesus, Trey. Who invited that guy? He’s bumming me out, man.") He was a star in the College Republicans and volunteered for John Boehner's campaign.

Upon graduating from Miami (O), the first thing he did was take a job in the office of then-Senator Bob Kasten of Wisconsin. So the first real permanent job he had was on Capitol Hill. Then he worked for Jack Kemp, then he worked for Sam Brownback, then he got elected to Congress and the rest is misery. I guess now we're supposed to believe that, on his way to the Parker Pen factory, he got knocked on the head, stuffed in a sack, and dropped on the sidewalk of Constitution Avenue.

The Twitter epic was bad enough but then, on Wednesday, he favored us with a Farewell Address that, quite honestly, if you spread it on the Gobi Desert, you'd have a cash crop of anything you planted within a year.

Ryan hugs Obvious Anagram Reince Priebus at his farewell speech. Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

(Before going on, can we ask, please, who in the fck did he think cared about what he said in his long goodbye? Democratic politicians never had much use for him. The scales seem to have dropped from the eyes of his misbegotten acolytes in the elite political press; make no mistake, Ryan's rise to eminence represents yet another monumental failure on their part. And the Republican power base in the House wanted him replaced by Jim Jordan, for pity's sake.)

He began by discussing, at length and dishonestly, his "unlikely journey" to political fame. And then,

I was just a policy guy. And I like to think I still am.

He had one major policy goal and, thank Baal, he only achieved half of it. He did manage to shove so much of the nation’s wealth so far upwards that it now endangers the crew of the International Space Station. However, he failed to throw seniors into the loving arms of his donors in the financial-services industry, and he also failed to turn their health-care over the his donors in the insurance industry. Poor Paul. He was so sad about this.

I acknowledge plainly that my ambitions for entitlement reform have outpaced the political reality and I consider this our greatest unfinished business. We all know what needs to be done. Strong economic growth, which we have now, and entitlement reform, to address the long-term drivers of our debt. Our revenue will soon return to its 50-year average. What continues to plague us is a mandatory spending system that is deeply out of balance and unsustainable.

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This was the case when I came here 25 years ago, and remains the case today. Not too long ago, few were willing to recognize the scope of this problem, let alone engage on solutions. Our government was not even inclined to examine our long-term fiscal picture. It just didn’t work that way. We had to go about changing the debate before we could even begin to try and change people’s minds.

I’m proud that every year I was Budget Committee chairman, we passed in the House a roadmap to balancing the budget and paying off our debt.

I remember that David Stockman, of all people, called his 2012 budget a “fairy tale.”

In this Congress, we came within one vote of real health care entitlement reform.

And thousands of Americans are better off this holiday season because of that one vote.

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For me, I will always treasure those moments in 2012 when, during the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden, Ryan demonstrated to us that he knows that it snows in Afghanistan in the wintertime. Eventually, Biden wound up literally laughing him off the stage. I hope Biden doesn’t run in 2020, but he did the nation good service that night. Ryan was exposed as such a lightweight that it’s a wonder he didn’t float out the window. Ever since, whenever Ryan got up to speak on an issue of national import, and whenever I heard him enable the renegade president* whose bidding he did, I kept hearing Biden’s voice in my ear like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

“Malarkey,” it said. “Malarkey.”

Anyway, I am in no way certain that we have seen the last of this jamoke. I’m sure he has a fat and happy future as a lobbyist if he wants it. He may still dream of the White House; I mean, Lord knows what the future Republican Party will look like once Trump gets through with it. But, for the moment, as somebody who will turn 65 very, very soon, and who is waiting for his Medicaid card in the mail right now, let me say that nothing became the career of the zombie-eyed granny starver like his leaving it. The rest of us are the guy with the shovel.

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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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