Paul Ryan is finally chucking deuces

[JDHURF]

[Spider]

GOP isn't burning to the ground. This bizarro nationalist/nativist thing is on the upswing throughout the Western World. In the US it's the GOP that's been subverted to become the vehicle for it. It won't be ending anytime soon. Trump is just causing a new level of revulsion and activism among Democrats. In the future, there will be GOP players who are less viscerally disgusting, far smarter, and who will be able to push through much the same agenda with more subtlety and without the immediate blowback.

We don't want the GOP establishment to burn. What's left of the party without them? Tea Party wingnuts, white nationalists, and various forms of less virulent ethnocentrist scum? People like Ryan, while repulsive, are the remains of the old school Republican party that's managed to survive from the 20th century and still at least maintain a pretense of core American values. Without them, we're left with burning crosses, isolationists, and walled off borders.

[Spider]

And this thread is a dupe.

[Kane]

It is interesting to see the party change so rapidly though. They're mainly there for Trump now - Ryan, McConnell, etc all thought they would be the ones controlling Trump and instead he's making it impossible for them to counter him without risking their own constituency at home. It's really not the GOP anymore - it's literally the party of Trump. Everybody else is retiring.

We'll see this again in 2020 with McConnell.

[JDHURF]

[Spider]

No. The Tea Party (such as it even is anything homogenized and consistent) wishes Ryan was one of them. And Ryan wishes the TP was something he could stomach. But they just don't mesh well enough. Must be hugely frustrating all around.

The TP has now been totally subsumed and harnessed to the yolk of trumpism...and it's got to be infuriating to Ryan to see that hardline right wing element completely lost to his more mainstream, old-school conservative agenda. Ryan isn't actually a racist, nativist monster. He just f**k hates poor people and all their expensive needs. Ryan doesn't want to rant about immigration...he just wants low taxes. And so on and so forth.

And so off Ryan goes. He's a coat and tie republican. He goes through the motions, but lives in the real world. The tea party are more straw hats, bedsheets, and sister f**k republicans who live in a waspy, fantastical Leave it to Beaver world.

[Kane]

Ryan took up Boehner’s position after some cajoling...anybody remember why Boehner left?

The damage dick armey and his associates have done is astounding. Freedomworks my ass.