Like most Americans, I’ve always wondered why so many businesses in Japan seem to feature enthusiastically garbled English slogans – so, given the opportunity, I asked a friend in Japan. He explained that English had a certain cachet, but that he suspected that executives made their underlings run slogans through a thesaurus until they looked sophisticated. “They never use something like: ‘Matsumoto Tire Company – We’re Dedicated!’”, he said, recounting the time he struggled to change one of their tires. “I finally pull the tire off, and I look at the inside of the tire, and it reads: ‘Matsumoto Tire Company – We Are Obstinacy!’”

I mention the tire, because it illuminates the experience of reading Paul Ryan’s brand-new don’t-call-it-a-campaign book, The Way Forward: an hours-long ordeal with an epistemically locked-shut Mad Libs thesaurus accident that ultimately says “screw you” as sunnily as possible.

Obviously, it’s not meant to. Ryan’s book celebrates the American Idea (it differs from the American Dream, the American Experiment and American Exceptionalism only in terms of nouns), which, he tells us, “is our nation’s most unique and powerful contribution to the world”. Ryan then goes on to enumerate a series of concepts of political and economic philosophy actually created by European thinkers. That is how powerful America is: it not only doesn’t need canon law, Ockham, Locke or Hobbes, it may actually have invented them.

The book, meant to be a prelude to Ryan’s 2016 comeback (the last chapter, a bit of Reagan nostalgerotica, is literally titled “The Comeback”) offers little more than the depressingly predictable, coming far short of his Republican National Convention speech’s bravura performance of making shit up, about which groups like Politifact could have saved themselves time by simply verifying the few words in it that were not untrue.

Ryan repeatedly relies on omission, hysteria (Obama “leads from behind” abroad and plays “smashmouth, raw power politics” at home) and false dichotomies to make his points, pitting the so-called natural state of the Americonomy against cold war tropes he hasn’t even bothered to slap a new coat of paint on. An understanding of “The American Idea” in terms of economics “assumes that productive enterprise and free choices in the market – not the edicts of centralized command – should shape our economy”. And here I was planning to run for Politburo.

The only amusement comes from watching him wrestle with Social Security. As you may know, Ryan is famous for issuing Randroid soundbites about makers and takers (he addresses that in the book by suggesting that those words were wrong and now bold leadership calls for new synonyms), despite spending 22 years working in government – apart from a very short stop off at his cousin’s Ryan Inc, which grew fat off government contracts. So it became sort of a big deal on the 2012 campaign trail that Ryan banked his Social Security survivor’s benefits to go to a more expensive out-of-state college.

So it’s fun to watch Ryan lean in to the Social Security thing and admit that it helps people:

When my dad died, my Social Security survivor benefits gave me a financial backstop. ... That money helped me pay for school. Our family was also grateful for the help we got from my grandma’s Social Security...Those were my first personal experiences with the federal government, and it made a positive difference in our lives.

It’s fun up until the point when you realize Ryan has no choice. Social Security hangs around his neck like a riot grrrl lesbian daughter giving her evangelical GOP warrior dad a hug on live TV. He types the bare minimum of gratitude before returning to his staple “do as I say, not as I do” lecture about nothing good coming from government money. Social Security should be dismantled, so people can take what they pay into it and then invest it in the market. Markets are always great (which is why one of their fundamental operating principle is “the greater fool theory”) but they make up for any minor negativity with light material, like systemic pratfalls.

Paul Ryan’s policies are so vague that he must bolster them by nightmarish counterpoint. He harps repeatedly on “liberal progressives” and goes back into the history books to castigate them, because otherwise the theory that Obama is not a Beltway centrist bummer and is instead the apotheosis of a “liberal progressive tradition” makes no sense. Hence: putting Woodrow Wilson through the ringer again:

He went so far as to claim that the Declaration was merely ‘a long enumerated [list] of the issues of the year 1776,’ and that we shouldn’t ‘repeat the preface’ – that is, the part that talks about self-evident truths and certain inalienable rights.

It’s one of many historical cherry-pickings in The Way Forward, but at least it’s sort of funny, since the word “inalienable” doesn’t appear in the document he’s smugly venerating. Then Ryan essentially accuses Wilsonian progressivism of inventing moral relativism, a term he doesn’t bother using.

Speaking of which, a huge section of Ryan’s book addresses Detroit – a conservative DMV analogy that became a city – and its implosion as a failure of “big government” and “regulation” and “liberal progressivism” and “stuff”. At no point does Ryan mention the roles that white flight, de facto segregation and a racially-skewed justice system might have played in depressing neighborhoods, collapsing opportunity and annihilating the tax base. Race might as well not exist to Paul Ryan, which in terms of addressing Detroit is like summarizing Star Trek without mentioning space travel. That an ahistorical Detroit appears in chapter one signals how seriously you can take the rest of the book.

The rest is a dog’s breakfast of mistakes and absurdities.

Ryan asserts that all millennials want smaller government because they can download individual songs on iTunes instead of committing to full albums. He relentlessly question begs on the subject of Americans preferring to waste endless amounts of time bargain hunting with their healthcare and – I guess? – using providers’ willingness to compete over sick people to haggle with them like Cairene shopkeepers. For a supposed economics wonk, he must have had to try to never address cartel behavior, irrational economic decisions made under threat of illness or a distorted market where people’s future health is held in jeopardy to extract extortionate payments.

He repeatedly condemns “state bureaucrats” for coming between you and healthcare, holding up market alternatives in a fantasia where there are no insurance flunkies who do the same. He proudly recounts an anecdote where he repudiates health – an integral part of the life part of our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – as a right: “To say it’s a government-granted right means that government is in charge of your health care. I think you should be in charge of your health care”. At no point does Ryan address where this fundamental tenet of his differs as regards women, who his record suggests he believes have no business fiddling with their own bits.

But accuracy and academic depth is never the point of these books; they’re meant to burnish your brand, effect a false humility about your past errors while admitting exactly zero errors of any consequence and ultimately repeat any winning trope you’ve leaned on before.

Thus almost every exhausting lie from the campaign trail reappears for a tedious encore, like a Ringo Starr concert accreting ever more elderly cameo jam participants. (Look, it’s “subsidiarity” again – the acoustic Clapton of arguments!) He cheerleads his visionary Ryan Budget Roadmaps without acknowledging the $4.6 trillion of unaccounted-for mystery meat in them. The word Medicare appears 66 times, and probably half of those instances refer to Obamacare destroying it while claiming Ryan will save it. Obamacare also destroys jobs. American corporations pay the highest taxes in the world. The mining and fracking industries are helplessly bound in red tape. Democrats’ only solutions are tax hikes, whereas Republicans have dynamic new solutions.

And what are those solutions? Faith, ingenuity, community, small government, deregulation, freedom, opportunity, privatization, inspiration, devotion, dedication, etc. They’re the same bold alternatives you’ve seen rephrased for 40 years, proffered as if untested on 300,000,000 guinea pigs already. This is what passes for significant thought in the GOP: new scare facts colliding with new anecdotes of meetin’ folks, all to explain re-synonymized tautologies.

The wheels fly off the broken machine, and there it is: Paul Ryan and the GOP: Entrepreneurberty Is Excellerate!