Bannon-Ryan cage match
by digby
I’ve been posting right wing emails excoriating Paul Ryan for well over a year now. They hate him. For reasons of their own, the Village refuses to see this and they believe dreamboat Ryan is a “unifier” who can bring everyone together. Nah guh happen:
A right-wing website closely tied to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is taking its war against House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to new levels.
Breitbart News on Saturday published as its lead story an article written by Julia Hahn, headlined: “He’s with her: Inside Paul Ryan’s months-long campaign to elect Hillary Clinton president.”
Accompanying the story is an image of a grinning Ryan beside the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign slogan, “I’m with her.”
The piece is brutal even by the standards of Breitbart’s proudly scorched-earth approach to journalism, asserting that Ryan “leads the pro-Islamic migration wing of the Republican party.”
The 2,800-word attack on Ryan comes amid a concerted strategy by the pro-Trump nationalist wing of the GOP to ensure Ryan isn’t re-elected Speaker in January.
Influential Fox News host Sean Hannity — a major Trump booster — is leading the charge against Ryan, calling him a “saboteur.” Members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus held a conference call last week in which they discussed challenging Ryan’s leadership role.
The Breitbart piece, which claims that the Speaker has been conspiring for months to “sabotage” Trump, is straight from the playbook of Stephen Bannon, the Breitbart chairman who last month became CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign.
As The Hill revealed earlier this month, Bannon has given private orders to Breitbart’s editorial staff to destroy Ryan. An internal email obtained by The Hill showed Bannon telling senior staff in December 2015 that the “long game” for the news site was for the Speaker to be “gone” by the spring.
This latest anti-Ryan story gives further insight into the Bannon-Trump worldview.
It accuses Ryan and Clinton of being essentially the same person, and of both wanting to destroy the very concept of America as a nation state. This argument neatly dovetails with the language Trump is using in his stump speeches and media interviews.
In an extraordinary situation, the GOP presidential nominee is now using his campaign megaphone to attack not only Clinton, but the highest-ranking elected official in his own party. He’s ignored the counsel of GOP establishment figures and is advancing the
view that a cabal of “globalist” elitists — which includes Ryan, Clinton and international bankers — are undermining American sovereignty by pushing for open borders in trade and immigration.
This war within the GOP is already very, very ugly. And my bet is that rather than a Trump trouncing calming the waters, it’s going to get uglier. When you have 40 million or so people voting for a proto-fascist it’s not likely to simply fade away. They want the party.
Trumpie’s don’t give a damn about Ayn Rand. They have other fish to fry.
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