I think this move is more consistent with the side-effects of his spine-removal surgery. There is clearly a point of inflection coming, where the House of Representatives is going to have to vote to impeach Trump or justify why they aren’t against VERY heavy pressure. Ryan is now physically incapable of taking a stand, one way or another, so he’s making a hasty exit before he has to.
Seriously, this is a pure political play, whether he wants to run for higher office or just keep his job and return to congress some day. He’s a ratfink leaving a sinking ship. If he stays and the House dodges impeachment proceedings despite obvious wrongdoing by the president, he will be the Speaker who definitively proved that the GOP holds party above country. If he stays and the House votes to impeach, then he’s a traitor to the TGOP base. It’s lose-lose. If he flees, he can wait until things settle down, then come out of retirement to “save” the party.
I have, and all of it makes much more sense if you quit thinking in terms of politics and start thinking of this administration as an ongoing crime.
You know why you don’t pay a blackmailer? Because it’s never just one payment. These guys are quitting because the price for staying in the game is going to be too blatantly treasonous even for them.
Nah. The Dems shifted from social liberal to true liberal, the GOP split into conservative and fascist factions.
Liberalism was originally the ideology of deregulated capitalism.
Conservative: aristocratic, old money.
Liberal: capitalist, new money.
Radical: socialist, no money.
There’s a bit of crossover: the Dems still have a few old-style conservatives like Manchin, while the GOP conservatives wholeheartedly adopted liberal economics. But most of the rightward shift of the Dems was just them abandoning the social liberalism of the Cold War and returning to their pre-20th century liberal roots.
Democrats have a tendency to frame the history of recent decades as the GOP shifting right and dragging the Democrats with them. I’d argue that it was more that the Democrats shifted right (from social liberal to liberal) and pushed the conservatives in front of them.
The fascist wing of the GOP has been running a purge of the conservatives for the last year, and should complete it at the midterms. Pretty much all of the anti-Trumpist conservatives will be retired or primaried.
There’s a parallel discussion on similar themes going on in this thread:
The US has no significant political parties whose interests or value even come close to aligning with mine. There are no aristocratic Conservatives of the 17th/18th century Tory variety, and there are no true Radicals (obviously these two would be opposed on many points - though not all, see Disraeli - but at least they have interesting positions and viewpoints to offer). What there is in the US is all just mercantile Whigs, some wearing blue hats, some wearing red hats, and I suppose perhaps some wearing black hats now.
But my point about the Democrats is that the establishment Democrats more or less have the same viewpoints of Republicans from the 1970s. And the Republicans themselves are further to the right. But, as per the above paragraph, I’ve come to the view that most of these differences are window dressing in any event.
I remember, on election night 2016, thinking “well at least we got Russ Feingold back, no way he lost to Ron fucking Johnson.” Then I checked the returns and got really low.
Earwax flavored icing on top of that shit cake of a night. (This metaphor did not turn out to my liking, but I’m leaving it, because reasons.)
So I watched a clip from The View (hey, I like Whoopi Goldberg) of their discussion of Paul Ryan leaving.
Meghan McCain (who - I get the impression - has met Paul Ryan personally) got very upset that people were applauding his exit. She described him as principled and reasonable, and said that if you think he’s the worst of the worst then of course you end up with Trump.
I thought about that a while, because I definitely agree that Paul Ryan is a big part of how the US ended up with Trump (not what she meant!). It just strikes me that people who have been in the party a long time are deluding themselves into thinking that this Trump thing just came out of nowhere. Like the previous 8 or 16 years (or 50-60 years) of Republicanism wasn’t setting the stage for this.
In 2000 Republicans probably got mad at their critics for calling them the party of stupid, the party of racism, the party of fascism under George W. Bush. 16 years later the country is being run by stupidity, racism and fascism under a Republican banner, and instead of thinking, “Wow, our critics were right” they are thinking, what, “No one could have seen this coming”?
The Party of Personal Responsibility is always very quick to point out that if their standard-bearer is a racist fascist homophobic moron, it’s because the liberals drove them to that by saying mean things about them (like the fact that they’re racist fascist homophobic morons). Like it’s some weird sort of “I’ll show you who’s a racist fascist homophobic moron!” thing.
