So the Senate labored well into the evening to pass the bailout bill. Well, they were certainly hard at work all right… working to tack on layers of pork to the bill. There were tax cuts, of course, spread scatter-shot across the spectrum. Tax cuts for individuals, for businesses… I believe there was even a tax cut for poodles who earn money in dog shows. Money for rural schools was included. (That was a GOP initiative.) Some of these may sound like important proposals, depending upon your preferences. How about some pork for Puerto Rican manufacturers of Rum? Not to worry… it’s in there. Some slabs of cash for the makers of wooden arrows for children? You bet! Wool research? 128 million for auto racing tracks??? It’s all in there, baby.
Is there anyone who can take a page from John McCain’s play book and make these people famous? Who put these riders in there? Pardon my bringing up an unpleasant subject, but wasn’t this supposed to be the must-have crap sandwich that we absolutely had to have in order to save us from an economic Pearl Harbor? The most critical action of the last 100 years, wasn’t it? And yet, some of our Senators managed to take time out of their busy day to once again festoon such a critical bill with this sort of thing. An already-expensive bill had an additional $3.8 billion entitlement program for mandatory mental health care coverage by insurance companies.
To borrow a quote from Joe Scarborough this morning, these people simply have no shame. They can’t help themselves. In what they are all billing as the defining moment of their congressional lives, they somehow can not stop themselves from strapping on the old Federal Feed Bag and loading on the pork. Wasn’t the word “clean” being bandied about earlier, in terms of how the bill must be passed? The concept is foreign to this crowd, and they don’t even deserve the 14% approval rating they somehow cling to in the polls. If the crap sandwich in question is really that critical to our survival, then pass the damned thing and live with the consequences. By treating it as yet another vehicle for their insatiable hunger for handouts, they prove they shouldn’t be drawing a paycheck on our dime.