Friday, March 13, 2009

Too Selfless is Not Always Good

Ron Paul sometimes gets in trouble with pundits who like to point out that he requests earmarks for his district as part of his role as their representative, but in many of those cases it is hard to see why, for example, shoring up a sea wall in Galveston, which is an area vulnerable to storm surge during hurricane season, is such a terrible or wasteful thing.

It's occurred to me that before, the GOP convinced people to selflessly vote away their own jobs and houses ( a la What the Matter with Kansas?) And now, with their bordering-on-the-obsessive demonization of earmarks, they're working to convince people to selflessly vote away their own towns and communities. Fairly amazing, actually, in a weird social experimentation kind of way. Each step, going a bit further out - how long til people are convinced "Vote for Candidate X, he's promised to hurl the Earth into the fucking sun!"?

My original Grammy Award-winning post on earmarks HERE.

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