All Paul Ryan had to do was be just a little bit better than John Boehner.  Just a little bit. That’s all he had to do not go down as the worst Speaker of the House ever.

Nope. Couldn’t do it.

He leaves behind a mess. A damn mess, I tell you.

On the Truth-O-Meter, he scores in the negative numbers, which is hard to do when Trump’s around seeking that title for himself.

Vanity Fair says, “Ryan Laments Not Screwing Over More Poor People On His Way Out the Door.”

John Nichols reports, “Paul Ryan sends a shiver down Scrooge’s spine.”

Ezra Klein saddles Paul Ryan with giving us massive debt with his tax cuts for the rich.

Vox’s Ezra Klein says that retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan’s legacy can be summed up in one number: $343 billion. “That’s the increase between the deficit for fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2018— that is, the difference between the fiscal year before Ryan became speaker of the House and the fiscal year in which he retired.”

Richard North Patterson, in the Boston Globe, offers an explanation.

Ryan’s big ideas ossified in college — that heady time of imbalance between intellectual self-confidence and one’s actual experience of life. Most of us recover; Ryan did not. Thus his distressingly attenuated enthusiasm for the novels of Ayn Rand.

My friend Thelma sums it all up, “that boy is meaner than ten acres of snakes.”

All he had to do was be just a little bit better than John Boehner. That’s not a high bar.