Despite the best efforts of Bannon to act as though the whole fiasco was a clever way to bury Ryan — a man he disdains as “the
embodiment of the ‘globalist-corporatist’ Republican elite,” as Gabriel Sherman put it in New York magazine — it won’t work.
To paraphrase an old Barney Frank line, asking the Republicans to govern is like asking Frank to
judge the Miss America contest — “If your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”
You knew that Paul Ryan’s vaunted reputation as a policy wonk was fake news.
Your whole campaign was mocking your rivals and the D. C. elite, jawing about how Americans
had turned into losers, with our bad deals and open borders and the Obamacare “disaster.”
And you were going to fly in on your gilded plane and fix all that in a snap.
You can say that people should have waited for “Phase 2” and “Phase 3” — whatever they would have been — and
that Obamacare is going to explode and that the Democrats are going to get the blame.
You’re just careering around on your own, crashing into buildings
and losing altitude, growling at the cameras and spewing nasty conspiracy theories, instead of offering a sunny smile, bipartisanship, optimism and professionalism.
bill the Irish undertaker gave you as though it were a luxury condo, ignoring the fact
that it was a cruel flimflam, a huge tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill.
