U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan Out On Long Limb, Making Demands

Left to right. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater

[From article]
Forty-eight hours after Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination with a smashing victory in the Indiana primary, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he could not yet support Trump.
In millennial teen-talk, Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “I’m just not ready to do that at this point. I’m not there right now.”
“[T]he bulk of the burden of unifying the party” falls on Trump, added Ryan. Trump must unify “all wings of the Republican Party, and the conservative movement.” Trump must run a campaign that we can “be proud to support and proud to be a part of.”
Then, maybe, our Hamlet of the House can be persuaded to support the elected nominee of his own party.
Excuse me, but upon what meat has this our Caesar fed?
Ryan is a congressman from Wisconsin. He has never won a statewide election. As number two on Mitt Romney’s ticket, he got waxed by Joe Biden. He was compromise choice as speaker, only after John Boehner went into in his Brer Rabbit “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” routine.
Who made Ryan the conscience of conservatism?
Who made Ryan keeper of the keys of true Republicanism?
Trump “inherits something … that’s very special to a lot of us,” said Ryan, “the party of Lincoln and Reagan and Jack Kemp.”
But Trump did not “inherit” anything. He won the nomination of the Republican Party in an epic battle in the most wide-open race ever, in which Trump generated the largest turnout and greatest vote totals in the history of Republican primaries.
[. . .]
The hubris here astonishes. A Republican establishment that has been beaten as badly as Carthage in the Third Punic War is now making demands on Scipio Africanus and the victorious Romans.
[. . .]
Someone should instruct Paul Ryan that losers do not make demands. They make requests. They make pleas.
[. . .]
Ryan is saying he is ambivalent over whether he will accept the verdict of the Cleveland convention — of which he is the chairman.
If Ryan holds to his refusal to accept the decision of the Republican majority in the primaries, he should be removed from that role. And if Ryan does not come out of Thursday’s meeting with the Donald, endorsing him, the presumptive nominee should turn to Paul Ryan, and, in two words, tell him, “You’re fired!”
Trump cannot allow the establishment to claw back in the cloakrooms of Capitol Hill what he won on a political battlefield. He cannot allow a discredited establishment to dictate the issues he may run on.
That would be a betrayal of the troops who brought Trump victory after victory in the primaries.
[. . .]


Nelson A. Rockefeller

Paul Ryan is the Nelson Rockefeller of his generation.
In 1960, Gov. Rockefeller refused to challenge Vice President Nixon in the primaries. When Nixon went to Rockefeller’s New York apartment to persuade him to join the ticket, Rocky refused, but demanded concessions in the platform, to which Nixon acceded.
[. . .]

Only the appearance of Sen. Barry Goldwater at the podium to tell conservatives to “grow up. We can take this party back,” halted a suicidal drive to take the nomination away from Nixon.
After Goldwater won the nomination in the 1964 California primary by defeating Rockefeller, Rocky arrived at the San Francisco convention to demand that a plank equating the John Birch Society with the Communist Party and Ku Klux Klan be written into Goldwater’s platform. Hooted and rejected, Rocky went home and refused to endorse the nominee, who went down to a crushing defeat by LBJ.
Nixon, a party loyalist, campaigned across the country for Barry and his doomed party.
In 1968, Nixon got his reward, the nomination, with Goldwater’s support. And Govs. Rockefeller and George Romney, who had done the Paul Ryan thing, never came close.
[. . .]
This is one Private Ryan we cannot save.

http://buchanan.org/blog/promoted-private-ryan-125221

Who Promoted Private Ryan?
Monday - May 9, 2016 at 7:37 pm
Patrick J. Buchanan

Updated: Nelson Rockefeller's Legacy, Book Review

Posted November 26, 2014 3:33 PM ET; Last updated December 7, 2014 12:49 AM ET

 
Nelson A. Rockefeller


On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller
by Richard Norton Smith
(Random House, 880 pp., $38)

[From article]
In 15 years as governor of New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller, popularly known as “Rocky,” was as careful with the public’s money as he was with his own—which is to say, he spent lavishly, impulsively, and often indiscriminately. New Yorkers have been paying the bill ever since.
[. . .]
He quadrupled the state budget and quintupled state debt, including off-the-books public-authority borrowing. He created the nation’s most lavish Medicaid program, designed to draw down maximum federal aid to the state while saddling New York City and county governments with half the non-federally reimbursed cost.
[. . .]
young Nelson “routinely exhausted his [allowance] in a shop on Sixth Avenue, where he lay on the floor on his stomach, devouring Tootsie Rolls and the funny pages.” Smith describes the future governor and vice president as energetic, inquisitive, and mischievous—a natural leader.
[. . .]
Rockefeller had a self-serving explanation for why he never changed parties: “If I became a Democrat, I’d always be in the position of holding the party back, whereas if I stayed a Republican, I’d be pushing the party forward.” [. . .] In This was, after all, the heyday of “modern Republicanism,” defined by Dwight D. Eisenhower as “conservative when it comes to money and liberal when it comes to human beings.”
[. . .]
He was widely second-guessed for his handling of the 1971 Attica prison riot, which culminated in a bloody retaking of the facility by state police that cost 43 lives. Voters rejected his proposed $2.5 billion transportation bond issue in 1972. Disturbed by skyrocketing crime rates and the failure of therapeutic approaches to drug addiction that he had previously championed, Rockefeller changed gears and in 1973 signed the draconian drug laws that still bear his name.
[. . .]
With increasing reluctance, he would approve a series of city tax hikes and state aid increases for Mayor John Lindsay, whose candidacy he and his brothers bankrolled. One of the virtues of Smith’s book is its colorful portrayal of the tense Rockefeller-Lindsay relationship. Rockefeller thought Lindsay was ungrateful and incompetent, and on the evidence of this book, it’s hard to disagree.
[. . .]
 Initially conceived as a $250 million project that would take four years to finish, the South Mall would consume over a decade and $2 billion, including interest. The project’s cost was no obstacle, however, once the governor and Albany’s mayor, Erastus Corning II, figured out how to circumvent borrowing limits by having Albany County finance the complex with its own bonds and then lease the whole thing back to the state to cover the debt service.

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc1205ejm.html

E. J. MCMAHON
Hiya, Big Spender!
For good or ill, Nelson Rockefeller’s legacy lives on.
4 December 2014

* * *

[From article]
“He wasn’t a liberal. He was a problem-solver.” But Rockefeller insisted, “There is no problem that cannot be solved.” So he was a liberal, with a progressive’s reverence for “experts.” He gave the impression, his sympathetic but clear-eyed biographer says, of having “more ideas than convictions.”
[. . .]
New York’s best postwar governor, Hugh Carey, rescued the state and its largest city from the credit crisis that was a legacy of Rockefeller’s quadrupling spending in his 14 years, and of Mayor John Lindsay being even more profligate. “I drank the champagne,” said Rockefeller, “and Hugh got the hangover.”
New York, whose motto “Excelsior” means “ever upward,” this year will probably fall to fourth in population, behind California, Texas, and now Florida, which in 1950 had fewer congressional seats than New York City. “Excelsior”? Not exactly.
[. . .]
As one of Rockefeller’s top assistants said of him, “He’d have solutions going around looking for problems.”
Rockefeller was, Smith says, “Too busy doing to entertain doubts.”
[. . .]
In 1964, Smith notes: “By noon of the first day of eligibility, an estimated 40,000 [Barry] Goldwater volunteers had secured nearly four times the required signatures to put their hero’s name on the California primary ballot. By contrast, Rockefeller’s paid staff required a full month to qualify.”
[. . .]
As the 1964 convention drew near, Rockefeller was urged to mobilize the “Eastern Establishment,” replying, “You’re looking at it, buddy. I’m all that’s left.”
[. . .]
As Jacob Javits, New York’s liberal Republican senator, morosely observed, “[Goldwater has] made it respectable to be a conservative again.”

http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2014/11/rockefeller_s_ny_legacy_a_useful_warning_for_us

Rockefeller’s N.Y. legacy a useful warning for U.S.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
By: George F. Will
Boston Herald

Naples Garbage Crisis

History repeats itself. In New York City in January 1969, the newly elected Mayor John Lindsay declared war on "the power brokers." Trash collection was one of the services which unions stopped providing. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller used the National Guard to collect trash in May, five months after Lindsay took office and five months after the unions stopped collecting it.

[From article]
"Organised crime interests have been deeply entwined with rubbish collection in Naples for many years. But the problem has been aggravated by inefficiency, political opportunism and unscrupulous business operators."

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20101022/tts-uk-italy-rubbish-ca02f96.html

Berlusconi pledges to end Naples waste crisis

October 22, 2010

Silvia Aloisi