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