December 6, 2018

Paul Ryan is a spineless weasel whose biggest legislative success is passing a tax cut for the top 1 percent by doing nothing to help the people who elected him. When asked about the craven power grab by the Republicans in Wisconsin, Ryan had nothing to say. Scratch that, he had something to say. His exact statement to Huffington Post were:

“I don’t have anything for you.”

With that in mind, Ari Melber really dragged him in a segment on The Beat tonight for Ryan's ridiculous victory tour on the legs of his "legacy."

Whatever Ryan's reputation may be right now, let's remember for starters. Top Republicans used to herald Ryan as a budget wonk who would help fix America's debt....Ryan even argued that he would be bold when dealing with the first big challenge. Candidate Trump. He held back his endorsement for a minute and called Trump out for text book examples of racism during the campaign.

Then he played a hilarious clip or Ryan halfheartedly not endorsing Trump.

I'm not ready to do that at this point. I'm not. Claiming a person can't do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment.

But, as we all know, Ryan rolled over.

Melber jumped back in:

Okay. But then how do you campaign for someone who does 'textbook racist things'? In Ryan's case, loudly. Giving Trump a full embrace with a prime time speech at the GOP convention and in Ryan's case cynically, because as speaker, Ryan would habitually lie and claim he hadn't seen what Trump said or did to avoid having to condemn it. That was an open secret that blatant it actually became Paul Ryan's own punch line at the comedic Al Smith dinner. This was during Trump's first year in office.

He then played a clip of Ryan trying to mock himself by admitting that he flat out lies every damn day.

Every morning I wake up in my office and I scroll twitter to see which tweets that I'll have to pretend that I did not see later on.

VILE. Circling back, Melber lowered the hammer:

Very funny. I want to be clear, we're not applying a random standard on Paul Ryan here to confronting Trump. We are applying the Paul Ryan standard. He said he'd stand up to Trump. He proclaimed Trump's comments were textbook racist and then even when he had the second most powerful post in Washington after the presidency, as speaker, Paul Ryan famously folded.

Ari continued to drag Ryan for his inability to lower spending, balance the budget (or even stop it from flat out imploding in the last 2 years) and the tax cut for the top 1%.

At the end, Melber summed it up this way:

"Many of Ryan's co-workers just lost their jobs coming out of his tenure. Democrats experienced a massive blue wave, they've gained 40 seats in the House. That's with adding a new seat tonight. The largest gain in decades. It is a shoddy, hypocritical and, frankly, embarrassing record. I don't say that as an outside opinion, I'm judging Paul Ryan tonight through the facts and on the Paul Ryan standard."

And by that standard -- Ryan's own standard -- he misses the mark, fails by his own standards.

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