Thomas L. Friedman's column in today's New York Times has an anecdote whose punch line reminds us of blow-dried, empty-headed morons like Congressman Jeff Flake, the inmates who'll soon be running the Congressional asylum:
Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, is over for tea and I am telling him about what I consider to be the most exciting, moon-shot-quality, high-aspiration initiative proposed by President Obama that no one has heard of. It’s a plan to set up eight innovation hubs to solve the eight biggest energy problems in the world. But I explain that the program has not been fully funded yet because Congress, concerned about every dime we spend these days, is reluctant to appropriate the full $25 million for each center, let alone for all eight at once, so only three are moving ahead. But Kishore interrupts me midsentence.
“You mean billion,” he asks? “No,” I say. “We’re talking about $25 million.”
“Billion,” he repeats. “No. Million,” I insist.
The Singaporean is aghast. He simply can’t believe that at a time when his little city-state has invested more than a billion dollars to make Singapore a biomedical science hub and attract the world’s best talent, America is debating about spending mere millions on game-changing energy research.
Welcome to Tea Party America. Think small and carry a big ego.
That's Jeff Flake's credo. Except his petty penny-pinching -- granted, his chronic constipation would make anyone a little grumpy -- isn't about millions. He begrudges a few thousand spent on projects all over the country and ridicules them -- with sorry puns that must get a lot of laughs wherever morons congregate -- in his "Egregious Earmark of the Week."
He'll never spend a dime to do shit to help people, real people. He'll spend plenty of his political capital to make sure the Capitol adds to the national debt and balloons the deficit by cutting the taxes of his billionaire buddies/campaign doors.
To some of us, that's egregious. If you're in the tiny minority of non-moron voters in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, you probably agree.
