"The Fierce Urgency of Pork"

Charles Krauthammer writes:

And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington.

And yet this bill is even worse than that.  It's not just pork.  Along with all the special-interest group payoffs in the bill, it's also the "get-Democrats-re-elected-by-hook-or-by-crook" bill, pouring billions into "neighborhood stabilization" groups like ACORN with a proven track record of election fraud.  And perhaps that is why this bill is such a "signature," high-stakes, fiercely urgent bill for Obama and Democrats.  Given what they plan to do for the next four years, they need this bill to pass.

Comments

[MacBigot]

How ironic: "Presidential Pork -- The Other White Meat"

[Audrey]

HI!!!!!!