Paul "Ahmadinejad" Ryan and Ayn Rand

Like many teenagers in my times, I read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  I even read her play, The Night of January 16th.  All these even as I read Russian literature, Dickens, and plain old commie stuff, all of which would have confused the hell out of a profile-creating algorithm :)

Eventually, I grew up. I ditched the commie ideas. I ditched Ayn Rand's too.  Now, it simply fascinates me when old men continue to call themselves socialists and communists, or when they proudly talk about their Randian fixations.

Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand stories are, therefore, wonderful material, which Michael Kinsley, true to his form, exploits well:

Paul Ryan laughed. He stood naked on top of the vice president's desk in the Senate chamber, scanning the crowd of sniveling politicians below him.
He flexed his muscles, the result of hours spent in the House gymnasium. Look at these pathetic specimens, he thought. Not one of them could do a one-armed push-up if his life depended on it. Not one was worthy of so much as cosponsoring one of Ryan's bills. Every single one of them had been elected by appealing to the average citizen in his (or her — Ryan snorted at the thought) district. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that of all the men and women in this room, only he, Paul Ryan, had been selected for his current office by the president himself.

Awesome!

Speaking of Ayn Rand, how was her Atlas Shrugged received by critics when it was published?  The LA Times offers a few excerpts, out of which I liked this the following two the best:

Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times:
It is probably the worst piece of large fiction written since Miss Rand's equally weighty "The Fountainhead." Miss Rand writes in the breathless hyperbole of soap opera. Her characters are of billboard size; her situations incredible and illogical; her story is feverishly imaginative. It would be hard to find such a display of grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum.

and this one:

Whittaker Chambers, National Review
"Atlas Shrugged" can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world…. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.

 Now, those were book reviewers, unlike the contemporary state of reviewing!

Not to be outdone by America's Finest News Source, the original real-news publication that featured spy-vs-spy reports that Democrats are spreading all kinds of misinformation about Paul Ryan: