Paul Ryan, epic flip flopper between Ayn Rand, Thomas Aquinas and a hard place ...

(Above: doing the face book rounds).

Confronted by the international conspiracy involving Optus and the Singapore government and the pond's broadband, the pond has avoided tackling the serious issues of the day.

Two spring to mind, starting with the federal Labor government flip flopping its way into John Howard land on the matter of refugees, herded and hounded by Dr. No. That way lies frenzy and madness

And the other is the matter of Paul Ryan, and Ayn Rand. That way lies comedy and madness.

Now the pond, perversely, furtively, almost hopes that Ryan and Romney win.

Instead of the barely cobbled together, partly functioning Obama administration, there's a good chance that social and religious and financial zealotry, a bizarre combination of ideology and theology, could work together to end the United States empire even more quickly than currently imagined.

Ryan is of course a flip flopper on the matter of Ayn Rand, in much the same way as the Labor party is a flip flopper when it comes to ethics. His early addiction was notorious:

Early in his Congressional career, Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin representative and presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee, would give out copies of Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” as Christmas presents. He described the novelist of heroic capitalism as “the reason I got into public service.” (Atlas Spurned)

Then, when her atheism caused a little heat for the Catholic conservative (along with other Rand policy positions Ryan presumably hadn't noticed or realised before), he did a runner:

... when his embrace of Rand drew fire from Catholic leaders, Mr. Ryan reversed course with a speed that would make his running mate, Mitt Romney, proud. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he told National Review earlier this year. “Give me Thomas Aquinas.” He claimed that his austere budget was motivated by the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which holds that issues should be handled at the most local level possible, rather than Rand’s anti-government views.

From Ayn Rand to Thomas Aquinas in a leap and a bound. And suddenly subsidiarity becomes a justification for the political philosophy of "I'm alright Jack, screw you. Especially if you're poor".

Perhaps nobody told Ryan that subsidiarity is dangerously European, and a key part of EU law!

The trouble with flip flopping on ideas is that it gets you into trouble with all sorts of people, as explained by Ann Friedman in Paul Ryan Is Your Annoying Libertarian Ex-Boyfriend:

In the dating world, an infatuation with Ayn Rand is a red flag. You might not see it right away: Your date is probably conventionally attractive, decidedly wealthy, and doesn’t really talk politics. But then you get back to his apartment, set your bag down on his glass-topped coffee table, give his bookshelf the once-over — and find it lined with Ayn Rand.

Actually it might get worse. You might find Thomas Aquinas shoulder to shoulder with Rand, along with some Catholic texts explaining that condoms are evil, contraception is morally wrong, and having premarital sex will see you in purgatory for a squillion years:

You think back to your conversation at the bar: He treated flirtation like a conquest, a rationally self-interested sexual manifest destiny. He had some dumb pickup-artist questions and maybe a questionable accessory (a cravat? a fedora? a weird pinky ring?) but you overlooked these things, because he was quite charming.
But that dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged tells you everything you need to know. He sees himself as an objective iconoclast. He's unapologetically selfish, because it's only rational, he says. Sure, he grew up with money but he worked to get where he is today. He’s all about individual responsibility but he just isn’t, metaphorically, into wearing protection.
This is the part where you collect your shoes and bag and GTFO.

Ryan is the sort of strange possum likely to send all sorts of people into a satirical meltdown. Here's Jason Linkins getting seriously agitated in Paul Ryan, Capitol Hill's Most 'Serious' Man:

Ryan also has charts. And graphs. Which would be enough to make him serious without any of the other stuff. (And they're not charts about carbon emissions and surface temperatures, which could threaten one's serious credentials in Washington by branding one an earthy crusader.)

Yep, Ryan's a serious economist, a serious philosopher and a serial flip-flopper, yet another Beltway insider who's made a living out of pretending not to be a Beltway insider. (After his degree, he began his working career for a couple of senators, earned a little more as a speechwriter, then won his way into the House of Reps in 1998 and has been there ever since, as his wiki tells you here).

Naturally as the pond is inclined to be very superficial, it was immediately attracted to the news that in 1988 Ryan had been deemed by classmates the biggest brown-noser, and that this had immediately set off a Wiki Edit War (Paul Ryan, 'Brown Noser'? The Wikipedia Edit Wars Begin for Romney's Running Mate - naturally Colbert has been involved in bumping this war up a few notches).

(Some defenders have noted he was also voted prom king, but that's what likely happens when you're a top of the class brown noser).

And there have been other wars to revive, not least Ayn Rand herself and Ryan's allegedly temporary infatuation. Not only did she name herself after a typewriter, and ruined her health with heavy smoking, she then cynically bludged off Social Security and Medicare:

As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."
But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so. Apart from the strong implication that those who take the help are morally weak, it is also a philosophic point that such help dulls the will to work, to save and government assistance is said to dull the entrepreneurial spirit.
In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest. (Ayn Rand and the VIP-DIPers)

The pond could ramble on about Ryan and Rand for hours, but enough already. The point is made, with the rise of Ryan offering pure comedy gold for party-goers everywhere.

The end result might be the ruination of the poor and the middle class in the United States, the end of the American empire, and as it falls, possibly the ruination of the world, but every conservative loves a good catastrophe, followed by the rapture, and the pond is just doing what comes naturally after reading so many in the conservative commentariat.

Eek, up there in the sky, says Chicken Little, it's Paul Ryan, and he doesn't even begin to understand the contradictions in himself and his philosophies (and you too can read Ayn Rand vs. the pope, the two contradictory philosophies warring for Paul Ryan's soul).

Take it away General Aladeen:

Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.

And you could become an ardent follower of an émigré second-rate fiction writer still fighting the Russian revolution in her head, or switch to a Catholic medieval philosopher - absent lord help us, a Dominican - and draw up a tax plan which takes even more from the poor and gives even more to the rich, and call it Catholic and become a successful politician.

Only in America, where choice guarantees you both a chocolate and a cinnamon doughnut, and lots of flour and bloated thinking ...

Or perhaps only in Australia too, because we have Paul Sheehan getting terribly excited in an onanistic way in Game on as Romney picks Fox News champion for his sidekick:

It will be class war, tooth and claw, veiled by Obama's charisma.
Never underestimate the capacity of an electorate to sense what is false and what is true about politicians. Authenticity is the electric currency in politics. Ryan has it. The American public, queasy about the nation's growing debt mountain and stubbornly high unemployment rate, may be receptive to daring alternatives to printing money and government debt.
Romney, in his choice of Ryan, has made a lacklustre 2012 presidential campaign exciting.

What a boofhead, dropkick old curmudgeon he is. And Fairfax wonders why its circulation is dropping ... but they don't even offer a bonus doughnut for the pain involved in reading Sheehan ...

(Below: and since we mentioned dating, this has also been doing the face book rounds. Is there a spoof magazine for politicians, mentioning 101 troubling political philosophies?)