Romney has his VP choice made for him and awkward smiles are the order of the day...

The Paul Ryan era officially kicked off over the weekend with large, enthusiastic crowds of punch-drunk celebrity chasers armed with tiny glowing cameras or awkwardly pointing cell phones, trying desperately to capture a moment, so they could say that they were there that weekend when the turgid and frightening politics of the second decade of the 21^st century became incarnate in the mindlessly grinning Mitt Romney and his side-kick, the smirking brown-noser and career right wing sycophant, Paul Ryan.  Slavish but dimwitted media hordes dutifully reported this arranged marriage as some kind of potential tipping point – “a real game changer”, seemed to be the consensus – and the chattering class on Sunday morning television also had a field day talking about what it all means.  Well, I’m glad they asked. 

Romney was at a point in the campaign where it was becoming clear that he had nothing to offer; no big idea, no grand unified theory, nothing on which to realistically base a national presidential campaign except the simple proposition that he isn’t Obama and, by the way, Obama is a bad guy and a failure and hey, it’s my turn.  Heady stuff for the red meat crowd that reluctantly supported him after the circular firing squad that was the republican primaries but not much to hang your hat on as a substantive plan for the country.

Worse, Mitt was becoming kind of a laughing stock; clinging to his wife on a wave runner with a dopy grin, mumbling gibberish trying to defend his “work” at Bain Capital, trying to figure out a safe place to hide his tax returns, all while secretly attending all night meetings of the Toastmasters Club to polish up his extemporaneous speaking and trying not to sound like a rich privileged dork every time he opened his mouth.  Plus he had Ann with her multiple Cadillacs and dancing horse and hilarious attempt to relate to women by touting her own incredibly privileged life to get some street cred.  No, Mitt had nothing.  He was slipping in the swing-state polls and clearly floundering. 

So the party bosses met, probably in the basement of the Skull & Bones Club at Yale or some other bastion of rich, white men, and – over Cuban cigars and tumblers full of Patron – tossed around a few ideas they hoped would pull poor Mitt’s loafers out of the muck of his stultifying personality. 

The ghost of Ayn Rand haunts places like that; the devil that sits on the shoulders of the powerful to whisper sweet right wing aphorisms into their ears; “Fuck the poor and the doomed”, she whispers.  “They don’t deserve anything but the hideously banal and crushingly awful lives they’ve been given” comes the soft caress of her voice.  “They want YOUR money”, she says and the old white men nod their heads and murmur and grumble and curse just as softly.   “Give the insipid nominee some intellectual heft by choosing one of the party’s young turks, one who worships me as well”, she coyly suggests.

Well, maybe it wasn’t quite like that.  But the choice of weasely tea party pin up boy wonder Ryan surely is either brazen overconfidence in the extent to which the country is pissed off at Obama or a choice intended to give him some seasoning so he’s ready to run in 2016 when they fully expect to have fucked up the country so badly that the democrats are unable to catch their breath until about 2050.  Another four years of John Boner and the rest of the hyena pack snapping at Obama until he’s exhausted might just do the trick, an ominous thought for anyone wanting to live to mid-century with a shred of human dignity.

So enter Paul Ryan, a career politician if there ever was one.   For 14 years he has represented a small wedge of Wisconsin cheese, centered on Janesville, a city of 60-odd thousand people, 92% of whom are white, located near the Illinois border, just south of Lake Koshkonong.   Middle America personified, in more ways than just geography.

 Janesville used to have a big GM plant – the oldest one in North America – cranking out SUVs and employing half the town.  It closed in 2008 as the economy tanked and the market for huge, gas-sucking vehicles collapsed as well.   But today, thanks to federal stimulus money and grants, Janesville has re-invented itself as a logistics and distribution center for the Midwest and is doing OK.  Ironic, it’s fair to say, that the federal government – the one that the tea party rabble love to rail against, that needs to be slashed to the bone to eliminate waste and promote self reliance a la Ayn Rand - saved the town that Ryan represents. 

Just as it’s ironic that, after Ryan’s father died when he was 16, he was able to use social security benefits to go to college – the same social security program that Ryan now insists has to be killed to be saved, privatized, so his Wall Street pals can manage your money for you like the geniuses that they are - allowed him to attend Miami of Ohio University and find his way to D.C., where he has stuck like a burr.

Ryan clearly enjoys the media meme that he’s some kind of budget Yoda, a serious man, a deep thinker, substantive and bi-partisan, etc., etc.  But in his 16 years in congress he has yet to pass one bill of any consequence.  His biggest legislative achievement has been to sponsor a bill re-naming some dismal and forgotten post office building somewhere for his other hero, Ronald Reagan.   

But most damning is his performance during the two-term reign of George the Dull, during which he consistently supported policies – like enormous tax cuts for no apparent reason – that put us in the fiscal mess for which he now has the balls to blame Obama.  Mr. Budgetary Genius voted for two wars during this time and somehow it didn’t occur to him that we might want to figure out some way to pay for them other than to decide 10 years later that the old and the poor and the less-than-rich should be responsible, as if sending their sons and daughters to do the fighting wasn’t contribution enough. 

“America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”
― Hunter S. Thompson 

The nightmare scenario running through my head for the last few nights has been this; they get elected, Mitt drops over dead, and we’re left with an utterly unprepared Paul Ryan and a sinister cabal of neo-con foreign policy and national security advisors scheming in the basement, looking to reignite the drive for American empire in the 21^st century and smite any unruly god damn Arab or other anti-Semite who dares get in the way.  “Mecca this, you swarthy pricks”, they cry as the big board lights up with all manner of military hardware, fine tuned to raise hell.  “And ignore the Russians and the Chinese – they’re atheists or Buddhists or some god damn thing – who cares what they think.”

In his own way, Ryan is just as scary as Sarah Palin was – he just doesn’t give the camo-clad mouth breathers a hard-on, so the danger is more subtle.   But as a fine example of the current republican trend towards the mindless dismantling of government as domestic policy and caged wolverine foreign policy, he’s a bright light shining from inside the beltway, a grinning, genial personification of the new right.