Well, I guess there's a difference between a thinker and a doer. Paul Ryan thinks a lot. Republican thinkers think he's a thinking man's thinker. The man is a thinking machine, spends lots of his free time thinking. He thinks in the morning, he thinks right after lunch, he thinks his way through dinner and part way into dessert. Of late, he's been thinking of ways to distance himself from his atheist hero, Ayn Rand. More recently, he's been thinking up ways to pretend he never said those things he said -- deemed brilliant and bold and super-thinky by the RWS™ -- about drastic and damaging budget cuts to pay for battleships and billionaires. (Romney, of course, has been thlinking away even harder. And, proving that only a few people are always wrong about everything, even Grover Norquist, that grabber of Rs by their short tax-hairs, disagrees with both of them on military spending!)
Meanwhile, it turns out that all that thinking hasn't left the Congressman with much time to do the stuff that legislators actually do:
After a year and a half on the job, Ryan reached a milestone: He passed his first bill. It renamed a post office.
Four years later, Ryan got another bill passed. It lowered the excise tax on the parts used to make arrows.
This is the sum total of Paul Ryan’s changes to U.S. code. After 2006, Ryan’s focus was on a committee — the Budget Committee — whose main job is to produce theoretical statements of policy, not actual law. He has not passed a law since.
Exhausting, all that thinking and subsequent disenthinking. If he didn't accomplish anything legislatively, and doesn't think he can defend his efforts to voucherize Medicare, cut Medicaid and all the other programs for those who need them, like student loans and other frivolities, then on what basis should we think he's the best-thinking thinker of the Republican Party?
Well, it's not that in doing nothing while saying a lot -- most of which he's unwilling to defend now that he's the second face of the national representation of two-facedness -- he's alone among R congressmen. In fact, he's their perfect avatar. Or so I think.
[Added: I think he's been having to rethink what he thinks he thought, thinking about stimulus money, too.]
