Ya gotta love chutzpah, especially when it comes to Republicans, because they have it down to a science.
Rail against sexual depravity. Elmer Gantry was a Boy Scout compared with those right-winging, holier than thou Moral Majority Republican potty-sniffers who were bent on defending marriage with unending orations from the floor and constitutional amendments aimed at purging gays and the dire threat they posed to American society.
Rant from the mountaintops over waste, fraud and abuse and you find Duke Cunningham and Ted Stevens chopping those mountaintops and dumping the mined lode into their own private gondolas.
I’m setting aside for another day the unmitigated sheer hypocrisy and gall of all those now filibuster-loving Republicans who raked our ears, arguing vehemently how the American public demanded that a bill or a Bush administration candidate just “Get an up or down vote!”
No! No! No! This call’s for you: it’s EARMARKS!!! The scourge that defeated Republican presidential candidate, Arizona’s Senator John McCain decried more loudly than did the Roman senate Cesar. Oh, the many knives McCain would have thrust into the heart of the offenders: “My friends, my friends,” as he pulled that ball point pen from his suit jacket, “I’ll make them famous!”
Well, Taxpayers for Common Sense did just that this morning; March 16, 2009. Ranked Numbers 1 through 10, they are:
1. Thad Cochran, R-Miss.: $474 million
2. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.: $391 million
3. Mary Landrieu, D-La.: $332 million
4. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa: $292 million
5. David Vitter, R-La.: $249 million
6. Christopher Bond, R-Mo.: $248 million
7. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.: $235 million
8. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii: $225 million
9. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.: $219 million
10. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa: $199 million
Three points:
One, “earmarks” compose less than 1% of the federal budget. Eliminating all of them would make not a percent positive difference in any American’s life, nor in the budget deficit or the national debt. So please, just shut up. It’s not a tempest in a teapot, it’s disgusting political theater.
Two, as far as Senator Feinstein’s $235 million go: she’s the senator of what is, far and away, both the most economically absolutely essential state of all 50 and the one that diminishes the next 5 combined. California is a contributor state. Compared to, say, Mississippi, a receiver state, California gets nothing back. (As a Californian, I’m personally sick and tired of supporting all 45 of you sustenance-sucking malingerers.)
Three, in my best Jim Nabor’s Gomer Pyle imitation, “Suh-prahz, suh-prahz, suh-prahz,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky, is a flat-out liar. He claims that “[Republicans] tried to cut the bill’s costs.” That was the $410 billion spending bill that was left from President Bush. According to TCS’ spreadsheet, with McConnell’s 53 earmarks, the bill was increased by $76 million; not a speck of sand’s worth in the total picture, but a very long way from his claim of trying to pare it down.
