Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5634805518/" target="_blank">Flickr</a>/Special to The Politics Blog

international man of principle, to get himself bullied into being bold and independent.

Make no mistake. In his decision to make Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, his running mate, Romney finally surrendered the tattered remnants of his soul not only to the extreme base of his party, but also to extremist economic policies, and to an extremist view of the country he seeks to lead. This is unimaginable to those of us who lived here under Romney's barely perceptible stewardship of the Commonwealth (God save it!). If he'd even hinted that he agreed with a fraction of a smidgen of a portion of the policies on which Ryan has built his career, Romney would have been hanging from the Sacred Cod by the middle of 2005. And it's hard not to notice that the way the decision got leaked — in the dead of a Friday night, with the Olympics still going on, after two weeks in which Romney and his campaign had demonstrated all the political skills of a handball — fairly dripped with flopsweat.

(And how'd you like to be poor Tim Pawlenty, being told by Tagg Romney that he'll be riding in the roof carrier to Iowa again, with nothing in his future except, maybe, a couple of bucks at Christmas.)

Which is not to say this isn't a shrewd move. In one great swoop, Willard has recaptured a good portion of the elite political media, which has been crushing on Ryan's "courage" to take on the "tough choices" — none of which, it should be pointed out, likely will affect Ryan, who's already got himself an education out of the social safety net he now intends to shred, and certainly will never affect the haircut at the top of the ticket, or his great-grandchildren, for all that — and the coverage of the pick in the middle of the night showed that many of our finer chattering heads are already practicing tying the stem of the cherry with their tongues in preparation for covering the new Republican ticket. On CNN, at about 1:35 this morning, Wolf Blitzer was already warning Democrats not to get too cocky in the face of Paul Ryan's mighty intellect. "In 1980," Wolf told us, "Democrats were high-fiving when the Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan."

(And can we have an end to that myth, please? At this point in the nominating process in 1980, the Democratic party was ripping out its own guts in the worst intraparty squabble since the blood ran in Grant Park in 1968. I can assure you that the Reagan people knew this to be true, and a lot of the Democrats, especially the ones lined up behind Ted Kennedy, knew full well what a wounded incumbent Carter was, because many of them had gone out of their way since 1977 to wound him. The regulars hated him as much as they'd hated George McGovern in 1972. The difference was that Carter had won. Liberty Under Siege, by the late Walter Karp, is the ur-text on this subject. We continue.)

(UPDATES: Follow the Paul Ryan VP Reaction on The Politics Blog >>)

And Gloria Borger ran a pre-taped interview in which she seemed to be struggling with the issue of whether it would be unprofessional to ask Paul Ryan to prom.

In addition, Romney now has forced the administration itself to confront its own silly attempts to woo Ryan as a serious man of policy back in the day. Granted, they split rather permanently last April, when the president, correctly, referred to Ryan's "budget" as "thinly veiled social Darwinism." (Ryan got all sad about how things had deteriorated.) But, prior to that, the president had treated Ryan as though the president were, oh, I don't know, a CNN anchor or something, specifically wooing him prior to the big health-care summit back in 2010, when everybody was oh-so-reasonable while the howler monkeys were out across the dim horizon, photoshopping bones through the president's nose. Nonetheless, it can be argued — and I'm fairly sure it will be — that Ryan is the logical end of any Grand Bargain the White House strikes on the economy and on debt reduction. And, if you have committed yourselves to that latter purpose over most others, then it's harder for you to argue against a guy who's more committed than you are to your own ultimate goal.

I have none of those problems.

Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he's ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.

In the lengthy — and now, very prescient — profile of Ryan that ran in The New Yorker this week, Ryan Lizza pinned him down on this very point. Ryan responded in fluent Weaselspeak....

When I pointed out to Ryan that government spending programs were at the heart of his home town's recovery, he didn't disagree. But he insisted that he has been misunderstood. "Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature," he said. "As if we're some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It's a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy." He added, "Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports."

The fact is that his "budget" will demolish federal spending on those very things, either directly, or by sending the deficit off in the direction of Alpha Centauri. But the quote illustrates something else about Paul Ryan: get him out of his comfort zone of being thought an intellectual by the likes of Louie Gohmert, and of being thought of as a bold thinker by half the buffet-grazers in the Beltway media, and he really is quite the political coward. (In this way, he is a perfect match for the man who picked him.) He does not have the raw balls to explain to the country that, no, he does not believe in government — not the federal government, anyway, and not as it was originally conceived, as the fundamental expression of a political commonwealth. He's grandfathered his plan to chloroform Medicare so that, despite the deficit that he considers such an urgent problem, nobody alive today who might vote against him will be affected by it. For the same reason, he will not specify the cuts that he will make or the tax "loopholes" —coughMortgageInterestDeductioncough — that he will close. In any way that will come to matter to the people whose lives his policies will make harder and more miserable, Paul Ryan is still the high-school kid living off Social Security survivor benefits and reading Ayn Rand by flashlight under the sheets. Instead, he's a guy pretending to be something he's not, and doing so back in Janesville in a very swell Georgian mansion, which just happens to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Which, among other things, means that Paul Ryan, who lies awake at night worrying that The Deficit will come and eat our grandchildren, lives in a house overseen by the National Park Service, which means that he qualifies for a 20-percent investment tax credit for the house he lives in. Of course, his "budget" would largely decimate the NPS, but that would be only those parts of it enjoyed by other people. Yes, Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver, has done very well by the federal government that he seeks to dismantle. Come to think of it, so has Willard Romney, although we may never know exactly how well he's done by it. It turns out this is a match made in heaven, after all.

Of course, it still could be that they're just trying to give poor Paul Krugman a stroke.

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GREATEST HITS FROM THE POLITICS BLOG ON PAUL RYAN:

• Paul Ryan Is Not a Vice President. Paul Ryan Is a Fake.

• Paul Ryan Is Faking It Until He Makes It

• The Budget Kabuki and Our Too-Broken Government

• A Man Who Looks Paul Ryan's Storm Dead in the Eye

• A Triumphant Paul Ryan Is a Tragedy for the Rest of Us

• Ryan and Romney: A Marriage of Our Insane Times

• This Is Not Our Beautiful House

• Paul Ryan's Budget Is a Cowardly Political Joke

• The New Rights of Paul Ryan, CPAC's Public Intellectual

• Lyin' Paul Ryan and the End of Medicare

• Paul Ryan Is Living in a Fantasy Land Older Than Ayn Rand

• And So Begins the Great Paul Ryan Comeback

• Paul Ryan and the New Politics of Sadism

• State of the Union: Winning the Future, or Losing Our Mind?

• ...and Much More, with CONSTANT UPDATES ON THE VP PICK >>

PLUS: Tucker Carlson Interviews Paul Ryan for Esquire >>

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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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