More Tea Party/GOP hypocrisy
The Clown and the Cop
By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Trapped with a Fox News big screen in my stable of fellow trotters at the gym a few weeks ago, I took in the worldview that may give the White House to Republicans this year. After burning 400 calories, I was ready to torch the capital.
For almost half an hour I heard another rehash of how my tax dollars were spent on a clown, a comic and a mind reader at a retreat for government workers outside Las Vegas in 2010. Those tin-eared bureaucrats in the General Services Administration spent a total of $835,000. An outrage, of course, and it was typical, I was informed, of runaway government spending under Barack Obama.
Not mentioned during my face time with Fox was a defense bill passed by the House that same day authorizing $642 billion in spending next year — almost $8 billion more than the Defense Department asked for. And this vote broke a promise by the Tea Party-backed Congress, when they agreed last year to cut defense spending over 10 years.
Question: Which is more important, a bunch of clowns spending on a clown, for less than a million dollars, or a Congress that threw more than a thousand times that amount at things that are considered unnecessary — outdated bases, pie-in-the-sky contractor schemes — by the very people who are supposed to spend it?
(More here.)
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Trapped with a Fox News big screen in my stable of fellow trotters at the gym a few weeks ago, I took in the worldview that may give the White House to Republicans this year. After burning 400 calories, I was ready to torch the capital.
For almost half an hour I heard another rehash of how my tax dollars were spent on a clown, a comic and a mind reader at a retreat for government workers outside Las Vegas in 2010. Those tin-eared bureaucrats in the General Services Administration spent a total of $835,000. An outrage, of course, and it was typical, I was informed, of runaway government spending under Barack Obama.
Not mentioned during my face time with Fox was a defense bill passed by the House that same day authorizing $642 billion in spending next year — almost $8 billion more than the Defense Department asked for. And this vote broke a promise by the Tea Party-backed Congress, when they agreed last year to cut defense spending over 10 years.
Question: Which is more important, a bunch of clowns spending on a clown, for less than a million dollars, or a Congress that threw more than a thousand times that amount at things that are considered unnecessary — outdated bases, pie-in-the-sky contractor schemes — by the very people who are supposed to spend it?
(More here.)
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