Ryan mulls it over

"...so the top graph pretty much speaks for itself in regards to our economic outlook, and what it says is I give up, please stop torturing me with your infernal spending. The bottom chart is consumer confidence since the onset of the Obama presidency - up and down, up and down, it looks like the EKG of somebody having a heart attack, doesn't it? I could explain that to you in more detail, but why would you listen to a lowly congressman like me? You need someone important to explain it, somebody like a presidential candidate. I just pray to God that at least one of the candidates is able to do that for America."   Now that the thrill of Rick Perry's announcement has worn away and America feels a little sullied by the whole thing, the need arises for a new Conservative candidate to arise and rinse our collective shame away in the tepid bathwater of true financial understanding. The unspeakably dreadful news is that Paul Ryan is starting to lose hope.   "Look, the way I see 2012, we owe it to the country to let them choose the path they want our country to take," Ryan tells the Weekly Standard, his dejection deep enough to make him forget the rules about combining a singular noun with a plural pronoun. "I just have yet to see a strong and principled articulation of the kind of limited government, opportunity society path that we would provide as an alternative to the Obama cradle to grave welfare state... Unlike me, these guys, they don't even understand how to plot a path to an opportunity society. I'm not happy to say that, but it's true."   The way the Weekly Standard explains it, Paul Ryan is not only a man who knows how to plot a heck of a path to an opportunity society, but also a man who has stood on the rim of an enormous cliff and pondered the snake dive into the raging river below as a perfect metaphor for a presidential run. The vision so frightened him that he walked away really, really fast, although never breaking into a run because he realized that would suggest panic. Then one day his fiscal mentor Mitch Daniels shocked the world by saying he would not be a candidate, and Ryan stopped in his tracks. Slowly he turned, step by step, inch by inch, until he stood once again on the lip of Niagara Falls.   "People want me to jump?" asks Ryan, not at all surprised by the news. "Well, I keep hearing that and I can't blame them. But you know me, Cautious Paul. There's rocks down there and I could bash my brains out. You know my story and you know my answer - and I haven’t changed it. "Still," he concludes a moment later, "there's fifteen months left." And so a new savior appears on the horizon, one that has vindicated the Weekly Standard and given them the right to conclude their piece with these prophetic words: "No one close to Ryan will say that he has made a decision to run. He is using this family vacation - almost two weeks [sic] away from Washington—to give serious thought to diving off of that cliff."