Ryan "is to fiscal policy what Carly Fiorina was to corporate management: brilliant at self-promotion, hopeless at actually doing the job."

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COMMENTS: 
*  Ryan, like the Wizard of Oz, Hides behind a curtain because He's creating hot air, There's a Pony somewhere, Accounting for what Ryan does.
    *  Dig away all the right wing farmyard fertilizer expecting to find a pony, only to uncover Paul Ryan, deed to a certain bridge in hand.
*  It is a measure of how extreme the GOP has become that Mr. Ryan, who has been working the grift for years, is seen as a savior.  Mr. Krugman has been pointing out for years that Ryan's plans never add up and a load of guano. Of course, this has fallen on deaf ears in the media who are unwilling to just look at Ryan's plans which hardly rise to the level of hokum  See the surest way to be ignored by the MSM is to know what you are talking about.  Earth to MSM: a Nobel Prize in Economics ain't chopped liver.
*  Republicans are lazy. They always chose the easy answer. It's usually the same old thing : tax cuts. That will take care of whatever problem. Or in healthcare : more competition. That's it - never mind how complicated it is to bring affordable healthcare to millions - just more completion will do the trick.  And they certainly don't want to learn anything new. Looking at how successful health care is applied in other countries, they don't even want to know. Just use the same old thing - tax cuts, competition and maybe some trickle down.
*  Ryan wants to be President. He's 45 years old and can bide his time. Taking the Speaker's job would mean certain death for that dream.
*  Our sad reality is that no one in the GOP is going to be able to put the beast that is the Freedom Caucus back in the cage. They are the result of packed districts, and who in the GOP is going to set about the work of reversing gerrymandering? That's why Boehner threw in the towel, and that's why Ryan is avoiding it like the plague. No, given the media's pervasive shirking of responsibility for reporting truth (and, more importantly, calling out untruth), we've come to this - it's going to require a breakdown in our system, so that even those whose only source of information is Fox News are forced to confront the fraud that is the GOP agenda. Once we've reduced the government to "drownable" size, further reduced taxes, made still more cuts to the safety net, reduced Medicare and Social Security benefits, further blurred the boundary between religion and state, and then see even more in poverty, the middle class further eroded, jobs paying a living wage still hard to come by, have fallen further behind Asia in education, and see our emergency rooms filled to overflowing, maybe then we'll see that we've been had. But, by then, it'll likely be too late to repair a fractured country.
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The Crazies and the Con Man
By Paul Krugman, October 12, 2015

How will the chaos that the crazies, I mean the Freedom Caucus, have wrought in the House get resolved? I have no idea. But as this column went to press, practically the whole Republican establishment was pleading with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, to become speaker. He is, everyone says, the only man who can save the day.

What makes Mr. Ryan so special? The answer, basically, is that he’s the best con man they’ve got. His success in hoodwinking the news media and self-proclaimed centrists in general is the basis of his stature within his party. Unfortunately, at least from his point of view, it would be hard to sustain the con game from the speaker’s chair.

To understand Mr. Ryan’s role in our political-media ecosystem, you need to know two things. First, the modern Republican Party is a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems. Second, pundits and the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality.

On the first point, just look at the policy ideas coming from the presidential candidates, even establishment favorites like Marco Rubio, the most likely nominee given Jeb Bush’s fatal lack of charisma. The Times’s Josh Barro has dubbed Mr. Rubio’s tax proposal the “puppies and rainbows” plan, consisting of trillions in giveaways with not a hint of how to pay for them — just the assertion that growth would somehow make it all good.

And it’s not just taxes, it’s everything. For example, Republicans have been promising to offer an alternative to Obamacare ever since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, but have yet to produce anything resembling an actual health plan.

Yet most of the news media, and most pundits, still worship at the church of “balance.” They are committed to portraying the two big parties as equally reasonable. This creates a powerful demand for serious, honest Republicans who can be held up as proof that the party does too include reasonable people making useful proposals. As Slate’s William Saletan, who enthusiastically touted Mr. Ryan but eventually became disillusioned, wrote: “I was looking for Mr. Right — a fact-based, sensible fiscal conservative.”

And Paul Ryan played and in many ways still plays that role, but only on TV, not in real life. The truth is that his budget proposals have always been a ludicrous mess of magic asterisks: assertions that trillions will be saved through spending cuts to be specified later, that trillions more will be raised by closing unnamed tax loopholes. Or as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center put it, they’re full of “mystery meat.”

But Mr. Ryan has been very good at gaming the system, at producing glossy documents that look sophisticated if you don’t understand the issues, at creating the false impression that his plans have been vetted by budget experts. This has been enough to convince political writers who don’t know much about policy, but do know what they want to see, that he’s the real deal. (A number of reporters are deeply impressed by the fact that he uses PowerPoint.) He is to fiscal policy what Carly Fiorina was to corporate management: brilliant at self-promotion, hopeless at actually doing the job. But his act has been good enough for media work.

His position within the party, in turn, rests mainly on this outside perception. Mr. Ryan is certainly a hard-line, Ayn Rand-loving and progressive-tax-hating conservative, but no more so than many of his colleagues. If you look at what the people who see him as a savior are saying, they aren’t talking about his following within the party, which isn’t especially passionate. They’re talking, instead, about his perceived outside credibility, his status as someone who can stand up to smarty-pants liberals — someone who won’t, says MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, be intimidated by “negative articles in The New York Times opinions page.” (Who knew we had such power?)

Which brings us back to the awkward fact that Mr. Ryan isn’t actually a pillar of fiscal rectitude, or anything like the budget expert he pretends to be. And the perception that he is these things is fragile, not likely to survive long if he were to move into the center of political rough and tumble. Indeed, his halo was visibly fraying during the few months of 2012 that he was Mitt Romney’s running mate. A few months as speaker would probably complete the process, and end up being a career-killer.

Predictions aside, however, the Ryan phenomenon tells us a lot about what’s really happening in American politics. In brief, crazies have taken over the Republican Party, but the media don’t want to recognize this reality. The combination of these two facts has created an opportunity, indeed a need, for political con men. And Mr. Ryan has risen to the challenge.
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