The House Speakership was wrested away from Paul Ryan’s sweaty, limp grip today and the gavel passed to Nancy Pelosi, ushering in a world in which there are finally meaningful checks on President’s Trump power.
Republicans were all too happy to sit back and watch as the leader of their party shredded democratic norms and transformed the Executive Branch into a corrupt moneymaking machine for himself and his equally detestable family over the past two years. Now that Democrats control the House of Representatives, things look grim for Trump and his cronies.
With much of the country celebrating Ryan’s departure, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman decided to take to Twitter to weigh in on the changing of the guard. He pointed out that Ryan is vacating his office with an abysmally low “favorability” rating of 12%.
Krugman then pivoted to criticize the mainstream media for the way in which they fawned over Ryan for years. He explained that the appreciation for Ryan was mainly due to media figures living within the D.C. bubble, and had little connection with the broader, low opinion much of the country actually had towards him. As he puts it, most voters “despised” Ryan and the laudatory coverage was rooted in the perception of his “ideas,” which ended up being utter rubbish.
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The renowned economist pointed out that while Ryan was deeply unliked, the media never ran stories about him being “unlikeable,” something they do frequently about female politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Speaker Pelosi (D-CA). Krugman correctly identified the double-standard as rank sexism.
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Krugman is right to take Paul Ryan to task. His legacy will be one of capitulation and enabling the worst president in American history. There is little that can be said in Ryan’s favor, and history will remember him as a spineless servant of plutocratic interests.
Whatever happened to the days when Ryan was a media darling, receiving constant praise for his seriousness and honesty? I've talked a lot about how his phoniness was obvious from the beginning 2/ https://t.co/VC0OUlaCEI
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 3, 2019
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Strange to say, however, you never ever read stories about how unlikable Ryan was. It was all about the wonderful substance of his ideas — which were, in fact, obviously fraudulent. 4/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 3, 2019
What we're seeing here is both sexism and the bias of the news media, which isn't so much partisan as tilted toward politicians who pretend to care about centrist pieties even when they actually treat them with contempt 6/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 3, 2019
