IRREVERENT Magazine - Features

With Mother's Day rapidly approaching, the offices of R.A. Enterprises are taking on a festive air.  I've always encouraged my staff to maintain close family ties and to fondly remember the woman who spent an extremely uncomfortable nine months bringing them into the world.  As I sat contemplating the rising costs to be imposed by the Medicare Reform and Wealth Transfer Act, however, I began to think that maybe dear old mum, and let's not forget her better half, needed to take a deep breath off of a shallow oxygen tank.  In a combination of executive lying and Congressional undersight unseen since Iraqi Freedom^TM it seems we can't afford to keep our mummies anywhere other than a crypt.

Now I'm reminded by my Legal Samurai, Mr. Suntori that I'm on dangerous ice and could, in fact, be advocating the murder of the nation's elderly.  Nothing could be further from the truth, except the $395 BILLION figure the Bushies told congress it would cost to make sure mom got a regular supply of insulin.  It now turns out that the actual cost could be $100 BILLION more, and it seems that a key Medicare staffer knew it (source http://www.miami.com/).  He claimed that he was ordered by his boss to sit on the numbers or run the risk of being Trumped.  When roused from their term-long hibernation  for comment, several congressional zombies, who claimed to be budget hawks said that they never would have voted for the bill if it was going to cost more than $400 BILLION, $395 BILLION is O.K., but not $400 BILLION.  They also claimed to be "shocked, shocked that there was lying going on."

Now it's well known that politics makes strange bedfellows, and in this case they don't get no stranger than Representative Henry Waxman, a Dimocrat from Cahleefornya.  Waxman who's never met a big government program he didn't like, unless it was tobacco subsidies, has decided that his position as ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee (boy do these guys have a lot to do) makes him the perfect man to take point on this issue, but one wonders what he would like the outcome to be.  Would he take the drug benefit away from seniors who form part of his base?  Or is he trying to reintroduce legislation that would make the whole thing more expensive?  Either way, you my good taxpaying reader are going to get stuck with the bill.  Both for the actual program and then for Waxman's "investigation" to sort out how much the White House lied to get it's way.  You would think that we already know that the Administration lied to the tune of $100 BILLION dollars, but apparently Waxman wants to be sure.

Lest you think the Democrats are the only ones distressed about this, consider the case of those poor Republicans who voted for this piece of chicanery.  One assumes that they, being good  conservatives, were elected to conserve some of the money that past Republicans had pried out of  the previous administration's budget.  Now they have to go home and tell their constituents that not only did their own president lie to them about WMD, but they also got faked out of their jocks over Grandpa's Viagra.  Oh, and all that budget surplus...it's gone jocko!  What's an elephant to do?

One Republican't Representative, Nick Smith of Michigan, has decided to give his GOP buddies a viable "devil made me do it defense."  Smith voted against the bill, and claimed shortly afterward that Republican shake down artists had  offered to give his son, Brad Smith, who is running to take over dad's seat next year (Note to readers in Michigan's 7th congressional:  what? the Family Bush hasn't given you enough political nepotism?), campaign contributions over $100,000 in exchange for a "yes" vote.  A "no" vote would mean that little Bradley's political ambitions would run into a Republican National Committee buzzsaw in November.   Such allegations got the attention of the crack-smoking, er, crack  House Ethics Committee despite the fact the threats clearly weren't effective.  Interestingly, Smith the Elder tried to distance himself from the bribery claim; maybe this time the threats involved sending little Bradley home in a box.

At this point you're probably wondering what, other than a hasty visit to the Caymans with several sacks of cash, you The Humble Citizen can do to remedy, or at least take revenge for, all of this.  Well fortunately I have The Answer^TM.  The best bit is that it allows you to vote without knowing anything about the candidates at all.  Of course if you'd done that in the first place we wouldn't be in this mess, but I'm here to help not hurt.  What you do is go to your local polling place and simply vote against all the incumbents.  Republican, Democrat, Green, or Libertarian, it doesn't matter.  If a candidate, party, or a candidate's parent (you dumb Michigan bastards),  is holding the office, boot 'em out.  Sure you're going to lose experience, but how much experience does it take to be lied to?  Hell it happens to the editor of this waste of bandwidth everytime I tell him a virus ate my column and it happens to me every time he says the check won't bounce.  As for me, I'm going to call my mom.  Now let's see...if it's 9:00 here in the Caymans what time is it in Colorado?

---

Note: significant portions of this column were blatantly lifted from an article on the Miami Herald website listed above.  It would be a mistake to think that, unlike anything else in IRREVERENT, this column was in any way based on my own original research into the matter.