‘Paul Ryan is the biggest fake I’ve ever seen in politics’: Watch MSNBC panel destroy the outgoing House speaker
"House Speaker Paul Ryan is retiring from Congress and today the Wisconsin Republican gave his farewell speech, in which he offered more of the schtick he's been honing for decades," Hayes noted.
The host explained the disconnect between Ryan hyping himself as a fiscal hawk, when in fact he drastically expanded the deficit on his watch.
"When Ryan became speaker in 2015, the deficit was $438 billion. This year -- with unified Republican government -- it's up to $779 billion," Hayes explained. "Next year, thanks in large part to Paul Ryan and his party, it's expected to hit nearly $1 trillion."
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'All In' graphic: 'Deficit balloons under Paul Ryan'[/caption]
"I think with him it's a little of the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king -- which is to say that he actually did have significantly more grasp of policy details than the vast majority of the Republican caucus, though maybe that's not saying much," Hayes noted.
"He certainly had academic patter down a lot better than a lot of them did," Esquire's Charles Pierce explained.
"To me -- and I grew up in Massachusetts -- Paul Ryan is the biggest fake I've ever seen in politics," he added. "I mean, nobody's close."
"Paul Ryan cares about one thing and only one thing shoving as much wealth up to the very, very top of the food chain and making sure it doesn't trickle back down again," he argued. "That's the summation of Paul Ryan's legacy."
Hayes noted that Donald Trump once even warned Republicans about Ryan.
"I mean, you know, my abiding memory of Paul Ryan will be Joe Biden laughing at him during a debate, which as far as I know is unprecedented in American political debating," Pierce noted.
"That was the -- you know, it was an economic discussion that brought out the word 'malarkey' -- which had never appeared in a presidential or vice presidential debate before," he continued.
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