A Clown; A Very Sad Little Clown

I’ve heard people ask recently, as the purposefully-engineered fiscal cliff “crisis” has passed and the debt ceiling farce begins, what’s happened to the GOP’s “intellectual budget heavyweight,” Paul Ryan? He should be more visible; he really should. After all, since our Congress has become a circus, we ought to have clowns.

How this little boy, whose intellectual development seems to have stopped sometime soon after high school, became known for his gravity and heft is beyond me. Sometime in his late teens, he was introduced to the writings of Ayn Rand and has since become a true and evangelical believer in Rand’s philosophy. He apparently makes his staff read her novels and often quotes passages he finds particularly inspirational, especially John Galt’s  interminable (and childish) close to Atlas Shrugged. I won’t quote it here (Trust me, I’m doing you a great service.) but it’s precisely the type of big speech an adolescent might become completely taken with but, with luck and real life experience, would soon enough outgrow.

In last year’s vice presidential debate, Joe Biden had the honesty (if, perhaps, bad manners) to laugh out loud at Ryan’s juvenile posturing. In truth, Ryan isn’t the kind of clown you laugh at. He’s the kind you pity, then escort offstage – preferably, as soon as possible, before he does any real harm.