In the last few years a lot of people have written to this blog, denouncing our policy of attacking stupidity in government. The reason we have promulgated these attacks is very simple. Stupidity is far more dangerous than dishonesty. Dishonest people will crack the golden egg only if they are also stupid. Stupid people are far more dangerous than dishonest people because dishonest people will always act in a manner that they perceive to be in their own best interest, regardless of the needs and desires of others. Stupid people do dumb things for imperceptible reasons and usually leave a trail of damage behind them that they don’t even realize exists.
Such is the current bent of a far right Republican party determined to commit political suicide in an ill fated attempt to get its way by foiling programs that a vast majority of Americans support.
The far Right GOP doesn’t like Obamacare. Really! I’m sure this is news to them but the rest of the country does and wants it to stay. It proved this in the last two presidential elections. The far right can’t explain why they don’t want Obamacare, they just know that they don’t. This is what I mean about stupid people being dangerous, because they have decided that if they don’t get their way they are going to shut down the government, clearly an intelligent approach to problem solving.
Besides abolishing Obama care, a mission, at which, they have already failed over 40 times in the last five years, the Right, through the House majority leader Eric Cantor, has issued a dirty laundry list of other things they think they want to pass or stop. These include, approving the KeystoneXL pipeline, delaying health reform for a year if they can’t stop it entirely, changing the tax code so that if will favor the rich even more than it does now, cutting food stamps to needy families and allowing Texas to secede from the country. I’m only kidding about that one. We should be so lucky. I’m sure they’d like to but even the most radical Right can’t find enough nut cases to make that one fly.
Speaking of Texas, Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, went on TV the other night and proved just how stupid a human being can be. He performed a phony filibuster for 21 hours, just to prove… nothing. He got his 15 minutes of fame but he got nothing done; oh, maybe I’m wrong about that. He did prove just how brain dead a human can actually be, and still retain his motor function. He walked, he talked and yet he communicated nothing, at least nothing of any worth.
It’s the real priorities, however, that make me refer to the far right as brain dead, because even a child can see how destructive to the country these changes would be. We have covered the pipeline ad infinitum and even the slowest among us can see that there is no practical value to this project for the overwhelming majority of Americans. It will not make any significant impression on the jobs situation. It will poison the world’s atmosphere because tar sand oil is the most destructive of the fossil fuels. And it poisons the land and water because the Keystone people have already demonstrated their inability to keep their pipes from rupturing wherever they already exist.
Yes, a few already rich, oilmen, will get richer and they will be able to ship their product to China but everyone else will get screwed. How can this be part of a political party’s agenda? It is bad for almost everyone in the country. Don’t these fools want anyone’s vote?
The only reason they want to delay the implementation of the ACA by a year is so that they can claim that even though he fought for it Obama wasn’t able to make it happen. This would be a good argument if it wasn’t for the fact that their failure to fund the program has been the reason it is behind schedule. For 70 years every politician in Washington has been trying to put together a health care bill and get it passed. Obama managed to do this. How dumb is it to not try and make it into the best bill possible?
Yes, we need tax reform but not what the Republicans have in mind. Cutting corporate taxes for those already too rich to attack is not policy, it’s felony, and that leads me to food stamps.
The Right wing of the House voted recently to remove food stamps from the farm, bill. Why did they do that? Simple. By removing food stamps from the farm, bill they could pass the rest of the bill which is a handout to factory farming, which is already a gold mine and remove funding from people who need the stamps to eat.
Fourteen House Republicans with a total net worth of $124.5 million, including$7.2 million in farm subsidies voted to take food from the mouths of children while continuing to put money in their own pockets. This is an evil, immoral move but it’s only stupid if they want to get elected again.
This would slash funding from about 4 million people over the next couple of years. To hear the GOP tell it these are people who are stealing from the rest of Americans. To quote Rep. Tim Huelskamp, ® Kansas, as he tells us why he wants to cut money for food stamps. “You can no longer sit on your couch… and expect the federal taxpayer to feed you.”
This would be a fine reason if it were what actually happens. Sure there are some people cheating the system, just like there are some people cheating every system that exists in the world today but the solution is to catch the cheats not to starve the kids. Only a moron like Huelskamp would think otherwise.
The reality of food stamp use is that a huge percentage of those using them work one or more jobs already, but they just don’t make enough money at those jobs to feed their families. For that we can thank the huge companies that are getting tax breaks and applying that money to their corporate bonuses instead of higher or at least sustainable wages.
One more interesting fact that is guaranteed to backfire on the anti- food stamp right, which because of who they are, think that all that food stamp money is going to minorities and illegal immigrants. According to the Census Bureau, about 14% of households in the U.S. receive food stamps. That’s a total of 16.6 million households, of which 48% are non-Hispanic whites. 26% are black and 21 % are Hispanic. Four of the five states with the biggest share of people on food stamps are Red states, Mississippi, Kentucky, Maine and Tennessee. The only member of that group that leans to the Democrats is Michigan, and not by much. Does this look as much to you as it does to me that the stupid party is trying to starve its own backers and cut its own throat?
This should put quite a hole in the 2014 Republican vote when a huge voting block finds who’s been taking food out of their kid’s mouths.
Of course the cherry on top of the stupidity cone is, if you don’t do what we want we’ll take our government and go home. That’ll really work. There must be someone in that party with enough basic intelligence to realize that if the Right does this, it will become a political afterthought. Who in their right mind would vote for a bunch of morons who shut down the government, for any reason, let alone such a venal and simplistic one?