The Paul Ryan question isn't why he has proved to be a phony. It's why so many commentators took him seriously in the teeth of his obvious fraudulence, 1/ vox.com/policy-and-pol…
I called him out from the beginning -- but was dismissed and attacked as being "partisan". The irony was that the real judgment-distorting partisanship was on the part of centrists, whose ideology demanded that there be Serious, Honest Conservatives to justify bothsidesim 2/
Ryan was neither serious nor honest, and it took almost no work to figure that out. But centrists needed someone to fill the box, so they promoted Ryan into that role. It was a massive moral as well as intellectual failure. Has anyone learned from it? 3/
