“The reason I got into public service, by and large, if I had to credit on thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” -Paul Ryan

“Our rights come from nature and God, not government.” – Paul Ryan.

Let others bust on Romney’s VB choice for his let the rich eat the middle class and have the poor for dessert politics. I want to point out something that’s irritated me about him and all the Who Is John Galt tea-ed off jackasses that want government out of their Medicare.   Seriously…Rand would chew all of you to shreds and spit you out in disgust.

I will admit to being a Randoid back in my twenties. In my defense it was something Ronald Reagan cured me of, which means I can look back on it with some relief and a little pride that, whatever ideology I would have become hooked on at that age I was never the sort to let a belief stop me from seeing what is right in front of my eyes. But before Reagan managed to convincingly show me how people who equate money with morality actually behave in real life, and what a government comprised of such people really looked like, I delved into Rand’s books and her writings hungrily.   Some say Randism is a kind of petulant ego trip, but for me it was my inner teenage geek thinking she had the simple elegant answer to all the problems of society and government.   Simple is better…right?   H.L. Mencken once said that for every complex problem there is an answer that is simple, neat and wrong.

I still have all those books of her’s I bought way back when, and even some of the newsletters. Give me a sentence or two of dialogue from Atlas Shrugged and well worn hardbound copy in hand I’ll put my fingers on the pages it came from in under a minute. I’m not exactly proud of this…but it’s come in handy from time to time whenever I get into an argument with someone who is still eating at Hugh Akston’s rancid diner.

So let me take this opportunity to say, as someone who has been there and can claim some experience with the territory, its culture, and its charming little village church…Ryan is shitting you. Twice. He’s shitting you when he says he admires Ayn Rand, and shitting you when he says he believes rights come from God, both. The magnitude of the mendacity here is you can’t even believe he’s at least being honest about one of those statements. To say both of these things is to basically say you believe neither one.

Anyone who so much as skims the John Galt speech knows what Rand thought of Christianity and God worship. Her take is so absolutely venomous it is just not possible to reconcile any form of Christianity, even the ersatz republican christianity of war, wealth, power and contempt for the poor and outcast, with Rand. Rand and Christianity do not fit together in any possible way.   Not even in The Twilight Zone do they fit together. Here…just take a wee taste…

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil – he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor – he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire – he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy – all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was – that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love – he was not man.

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

And so on… But take note: Ryan’s mendacity is eminently typical of modern republicans. They pick ideas from Rand and from her hated bastard offspring, libertarianism, the way they pick from the bible, like they’re populating the window display of an antique shop with any pretty junk that might get the passers-by to stop and look. Their admiration of Rand is intellectual the way a bank robber admires a well made shotgun and getaway car is intellectual, and to the same exact kind and degree that their religiosity is deeply spiritual.   It isn’t just about waging culture war.   When you’re busy plundering one of history’s great democracies, it’s good to be able to look in a mirror and convince yourself it isn’t a thief looking back.   The bible merely gives them a few handy clobber verses.   They have to skim over all the parts about loving your neighbor and getting camels through the eyes of needles.   Rand told them outright that theirs is the power and the glory and that even a little mustard seed of compassion toward your neighbors is anti-life.   She set them free, free at last from the loathsome work of forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to anyone but themselves.

Paul Constant over at SLOG reminds us…

Paul Ryan has a highly consistent legislative record. He has voted against regulations of all kinds—environmental protections, work safety laws, controls on the banking, credit card, and health care industries—and against spending on things like food stamps, arts funding, Medicare, and infrastructure. He wants to decimate Pell Grants and he votes against education funding almost every time. He’s strongly anti-abortion. He votes against protecting minorities and women—against The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, for example—but he votes for religion, arguing against the separation of church and state whenever possible. He claims to be for small government, but he votes for military spending a whole lot. He was against drawing down in Afghanistan, and he’s for government wiretapping and the PATRIOT Act. The only real divergence from that record comes from his votes to bail out GM and his support for TARP, when the entire country was teetering on the edge of a Bush-inspired collapse.

Something that worries me, though, is Ryan has a disconcerting habit of completely denying the reality of his record, in a very convincing way. If a senior citizen asks Ryan about privatizing Medicare, he will toss a word salad that leaves the senior disoriented and convinced that he’s actually for a stronger Medicare. He will force his interns to read Ayn Rand novels, tell everyone we’re “living in an Ayn Rand novel,” and even credit his entire life of public service to Ayn Rand, and then he will tell a crowded room with a straight face that his love for Ayn Rand is an “urban legend.” Both of these contradictory truths are on the record.

I think Rand would have understood at some level, even as she would have despised his bows to right wing fundamentalists.   She yapped a lot about the rights of the individual but for her it was all about the will to power. Her beef with religion, Christianity specifically, was almost certainly in all that stuff about being a neighbor and doing unto others.   I think she saw religion as a cousin to communism, and so even a religion that exalted the rich and powerful would have drawn her contempt, because to some degree all religion involves fellowship of some kind and Rand acknowledged no interhuman connections of any sort beyond transactions that are engaged in purely for self benefit.   She despised the idea that love could be unconditional and selfless.

It’s a view of human society citizens of the nation of Wall Street can see the rapture in.   A morality in which all that matters is acquiring and holding onto power makes the concept of neighbor pointless. Everyone is responsible only to themselves and harm is something you do only to yourself. There is no neighbor.   And without neighbor there is no shame. The people you meet are nothing more than potential sources of profit or loss. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are not contradicting themselves and they don’t view what they are doing as lying per se, let alone immoral.   Business after all, is business. They are selling you a product under the rules of a marketplace where the only thing that matters is did they get your money.   And that is exactly how they will govern.   Because theirs is the power and the glory, and Atlas don’t feel shame.