WALKING INTO A BUZZ SAW

On Friday, January 29, 2010 in Maryland a little less than 200 Republican Congressman walked into a buzz saw. It was a horrific accident! And, a good lesson to all white conservatives that have any notion that they are smarter than all African-Americans, just because their white. I’ve lived with the notion in the South most of my life. The old way of thinking in the South was that African-Americans are inferior. That’s was the civil rights struggle in the sixties was all about. Whites thought they were superior to blacks. This attitude was in full display in Maryland on this particular Friday.

Well…Friday (1-29-10) the House Republicans thought they would take the opportunity to show how intellectually inferior the new African-American President was to their superior thinking. For those who watched…it wasn’t even close. The President swatted them away like the fly he famously killed during a one on one TV interview. The President came armed with facts and information. The House Republicans came armed with a script they thought would play well in commercials for the general elections in November of 2010. As Chris Farley would have said…THAT…WAS… AAAAAAAWSOME!

And Obama passed up the chances for some easy political theatre himself. Two striking examples come to mind. First the Congressman from Utah, Jason Chaffetz. Chaffetz, pushed legislation through the House earlier this year that would prohibit U.S. airport screeners from using imaging machines which can peer through clothes to detect weapons or explosives. You know…the kind that would have caught the Christmas Day airline attempted bombing in Detroit. If the President had wanted to score come commercial political points he could have reminded the Congressman of his past judgment.

Then Congressman Marsha Blackburn…who presented, with her thick southern drawl, all the good ideas the Republicans had about healthcare that the President and Speaker Pelosi were “ignoring.” Of course, what was missing in her disingenuous suggestion was that she has served in the Congress for the past eight years. Her list of Republican’s good ideas for healthcare, apparently, were never good enough for submission to the U.S. House of Representatives during the years that the Republicans controlled the White House, and both houses of Congress. Because during those years the only healthcare legislation that was introduced was the Medicare Legislation that for the most part was a give away to the pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies and multiple billions of dollars of “unpaid for” largesse disguised as Medicare.

The Republicans sensitivity to their party possessing NO IDEAS lives on. They wanted health insurance to be sold across state lines…it’s in the bill. They opposed the public option…it’s out o the Senate bill. Still…no Republicans have agreed to vote for the legislation. Why? The only consistent excuse that I can find is from the mouth of Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who stated “if defeated it would be the President’s waterloo.” So if the President is for it…they’re against it.

In the only political race I ever entered personally I was confronted with an opponent who described his position on pari-mutuel gambling, an issue that was on the ballot as a state question at the time, as follows; “some of my friends are for it and some of my friends are against it…and I’m for my friends.” That’s exactly where the Republicans are right now…with their friends, the health insurance companies, the Wall Street Bankers, the polluters, and the defense contractors.