Perhaps you didn’t hear what our two area House Republicans, Ozark Billy Long and Vicki Hartzler, were saying this weekend at the NObama-Fest, also known as Lincoln Days, the annual gathering of Missouri Republicans, which this year was in Springfield.
Ozark Billy, swelled with what looked like pride, but it could have just been the free ice cream served at the University Plaza Hotel, said:
We promised we’d cut a $100 billion dollars. Last week we made the largest cut since WWII. We got the $100 billion cut!
Well, I won’t quibble with his numbers here—the actual cuts are about $61 billion—because there are nifty ways o
f claiming that 61 = 100, but I will point out again that the House GOP budget which Ozark Billy is so darn proud of will kill about 700,000 jobs, according to John McCain’s former economic adviser, Mark Zandi, who is chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
Fortunately for American workers, Ozark Billy’s job-slaughtering budget achievement has as much a chance of surviving the legislative process as the Bacon Wrapped Pork Chops with Pancetta and Apple Cream at Metropolitan Grill ($36), when Billy’s in town.
As for Rep. Vicky Hartzler, still glowing from her whoopin’ of long-time 4th District Democratic congressman Ike Skelton, she did not disappoint her tea party fans. She also enthusiastically embraced the job-killing House budget resolution, but to be fair to her, Hartzler isn’t much worried about the resulting job losses.
True to her conservative Christian beliefs, she demagogued the Obama administration’s move to stop defending in court the Defense of Marriage Act:
This week our president shockingly…instructed his Justice Department to not defend the law of the land, which is to protect marriage between a man and a woman…
She claimed that the “few men in robes” who changed the definition of marriage were “throwing out a 5000-year tried and true—what we consider wise policy…This could be the Roe vs. Wade of our generation.“
Now, I don’t know about you, but 5000 years is a long time ago. I’m glad we’re not using 5000-year-old medicinal techniques today, for instance. We’ve made progress. Learned a few things.
Except when it comes to understanding homosexuality.
According to the Hartzlers and the Longs, we haven’t learned a damn thing in 50 centuries of human thought, at least when it comes to sharing the sometimes mixed blessings
of marital bliss with those who enjoy up-close-and-personal time with someone of the same sex. How can that be?
Oh, I know. For most Christians, it’s that Old Testament thing. The Christian version of Sharia law. Vicki Hartzler would be the first in a long line of Christian hypocrites to oppose even the implementation of Sharia flatulence laws, yet she joyfully celebrates codification of an ancient biblical view of human sexuality.
And speaking of flatulence, Hartzler also had some unkind and untrue things to say about the root of all evil for the anti-choice movement:
Planned Parenthood doesn’t care about young women. They’re all about profit. It’s time we defunded them and take that money back.
That line received much applause. But when the applause died down, I waited for Hartzler to tell us who would help the almost 2 million income-poor women who get medical care and family-planning assistance via Planned Parenthood, should her and Ozark Billy’s cuts survive. As Gail Collins put it,
There are tens of millions Americans who oppose abortion because of deeply held moral principles. But they’re attached to a political movement that sometimes seems to have come unmoored from any concern for life after birth.
How true. Hartzler said,”Planned Parenthood doesn’t care about young women.” Using her reasoning, neither does she. And neither does Ozark Billy. And neither does the Republican Party.
And as Collins pointed out at the end of her column, through a misplaced and untimely fixation on abortion—and now it will be gay marriage, again—the GOP has become unmoored from any real concern about jobs, jobs, jobs.
Did I mention that the party’s budget will kill 700,000 of them?
ansonburlingame
/ March 1, 2011WELL Duane,
I have yet to read the Wash Post for news today. But according to what I saw last night on TV it seems that Democrats are going to agree to a two week extension and accect a $4 billion cut (from something) in doing so.
I suppose we can do that for the remainder of the year and come up with the equivalent of around $60 Billion between now and Oct 1st. I’ll let you do the math.
And while “we” as a nation “whittle away” at the deficit only until Oct 1st (see today’s editorial in the Globe) we will have to wait a while to see what kind of budget comes out for FY 2012.
With current gridlock between House and Senate we might spend that year “whittling away” as well I suppose.
Are you seeing a real winner is all this mess. For sure I have not SEEN one nor have I even HEARED about one, from anyone other than perhaps the Debt Commission.
anson