I was honestly not going to do any political posts for a bit — not enough fiction, you know. But I can’t resist.
Eric Cantor. I could say all sorts of rude things about him or say what my nickname for him is, but I’ll refrain.
Alright, I call him Gumby-head. Doesn’t his whole head, not just his funky hairdo but his whole fricking head, remind you of The Green One?
OK, now that I got that out of my system. . .
What motivated me to say something was to give props and hell yeahs and all other manner of praise to Salon’s long time columnist Andrew Leonard who NAILED Cantor. Check it.
Smirky, smarmy, and apparently not a whole lot going on upstairs — if he really believes that the debt crisis thing is all imaginary — that pretty much summarizes Cantor. I was amazed (and yet not amazed) when I saw a clip of him last night where he did not refer to the president as the President or President Obama, but “Barack Obama.” It wasn’t just that he was calling out the president by name, sans title, but the way he said it, smothered with a snide drawl that reeked of condescension. Ugh! Calgon! Take me away!
In general, though, the country is in a pickle if the best we can do is come up with Cantors and Boehners. They don’t negotiate. President Obama might as well be negotiating with potted plants. A potted plant looks the same, feels the same, and smells the same no matter what you say to it. So does, apparently, the Republican Congressional Caucus. If, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has stated many times, their only real goal is to keep the President down to just one term, whatever it takes, then they are worse than just potted plants. Potted plants are benign. OK, may they’re potted Venus flytraps. It makes me think of the old fable about the scorpion and the frog, where the latter gives a lift across the river to the former, who promptly stings his ride to death and they both drown. The scorpion’s only rational being “it’s my nature.”
It wasn’t always Republicans’ nature to be dangerously obstinate. Even a dyed-in-the-wool like myself can admit that this country has seen many great Republican statesmen and women. But we’re seeing fewer and fewer of them and in this age we really need all hands on deck. The real culprit of our problems is runaway greed and the consequence of too many having too much and not putting it back in the system for the good of all. It ain’t trickling, as many sage commentators have said of late, including Mr. Leonard. It used to be that even Republicans would begrudgingly admit this and raise taxes or spend money on programs that helped people when needed, to keep the wheels going. But not this crowd. Uh-uh. If this crop were around in the 30s and 40s, the Depression would be entering its ninth decade, with no end in sight.
Though, to be fair, a few are very begrudgingly starting to see the light, at least as far as not sending the US credit rating into junk status. The problem is that it only takes a few, like Cantor, to ruin it for everyone.
© 2011, gar. All rights reserved.