Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Sen . McConnell: The hapless hypocrite etc.

HAS THERE EVER been a more hapless hypocrite than Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate? McConnell a Medicare-eligible deadpan who should have been dismissed to his Old Kentucky Home years ago, has been an ardent critic of the stimulus program and once sniffed: "You do have to wonder, though, whether the stimulus has had any impact at all."

Yet, there he was, at the Blue Grass Army Depot construction site in Madison County, Kentucky, puffing up his efforts to finance the site, boasting: " This is going to be a source of significant employment. At the peak, we could have up to 600 people working on this, and we believe the substantial majority of those workers will be Kentuckians."

Guess what? No fair. You peeked. The stimulus package picked up $5,876,000 of the construction tab. Such hypocrisy has become quite common for stimulus opponents, from McConnell , Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford down to the Tea Partying Robart Administration in Cuyahoga Falls. As for McConnell, don't you think he should stop wondering?

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What's that!?!?!!? A new phrase has arrived to describe the health-care debate: Honest truth.
The redundancy appeared in a headline above an Op-Ed Beacon Journal column by conservative Charles Krauthammer, as in: The honest truth about end-of-life counseling. If any of you are aware of a rogue dishonest truth, I'll be happy to post it.

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The passing of Ted Kennedy has already given the Republicans' fascination with death a new platform to resist health-care reform in nefarious ways. The latest to speculate on what Kennedy would have done to defog the so-called debate is Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, another of the party's safely ensconced Medicare-eligible white guys who are out to spare America from
outrageous fortune. Without fear of contradiction from the deceased, Bond now presumes that Kennedy would be the man of the moment in resolving the health-care stalemate. Says Bond:

"I believe that Ted Kennedy, if he were there, would signal time out and let's go back and work together."

How collegial, even if it is fiction. Kennedy is no longer there, so what else do you now have in mind, Senator, to reassemble the inertial proceedings? By the way, LBJ isn't available, either. And by the way a second time, what's a good Missouri Republican doing saying nice things about a senator who declared at the Democratic Convention that universal health care is a right, not a privilege - the opposite of what the Republican mantra would have us believe these days. ?

PS: The reason I make occasional reference to "Medicare-eligible white guys" is that it is pregnant with meaning. The guys are, in fact, crinkly white, and are, in fact, Medicare-eligible. You have to pass a certain age for the latter. .

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I would like to hear Republicans say that they are willing to drop their benefits and see what it is like buying private medical coverage and paying monthly. I doubt it as it'll probably cut too much into their salary .