Saturday, October 30, 2010

You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do

This one doesn't even pass the laugh test:
U.S. Rep. Cynthia Loomis says some of her Wyoming constituents are so worried about the reinstatement of federal estate taxes that they plan to discontinue dialysis and other life-extending medical treatments so they can die before Dec. 31.
Brimming with compassion over the plight of her millionaire constituents, Loomis argues that
If you have spent your whole life building a ranch and you wanted to pass that along to your children, and you were 88 years old and on dialysis, and they only thing that was keeping you alive was that dialysis, you might [italics mine] make that same decision.
Loomis declined to name any of the people who might be considering this. Nor did she state with any certainty the number of 88-year Wyoming ranchers on dialysis with an estate eligible to be taxed.

The redoubtable defender of the privacy of millionaires stoutly opposes abortion rights, flatly stating that "abortion is a sin against God." Moreover, she opposes gay marriage on the perfectly sound basis that "God defined marriage as between one man and one woman." God must have told her so personally, because there's no Biblical paucity of insatiable phalluses connected to men with multiple wives. Or maybe it's in the Constitution.

When it comes to immigration, the epitome of compassionate conservatism explains how she would extend the same compassion she shows millionaires to migrant workers who pay taxes:
[I] will work to ensure that illegal aliens do not receive social security benefits, medicaid benefits, food stamps, drivers [sic] licenses, or other benefits.
Cynthia fails to mention that no one receives Social Security unless they pay into it (and if they do, why shouldn't they get it?) or that undocumented workers are ineligible for social services. So, she's not going to have to "work" too hard at that one. Certainly nowhere near as hard as a migrant worker at a Wyoming hog farm, the owners of which have about as much to fear from Cynthia's promise to force "employers [to] ensure that their workers are properly documented" as a Wall Street investment banker does from Mitch McConnell.

The sad part is, she's going to have a lot company in Congress come Wednesday. At least her election might prevent a few suicides...



Notice the much more polished direction (by Martin Scorcese) and editing on this abbreviated rendition:

6 comments:

Leslie Parsley said...

Yikes!!! I can't believe this. It just gets worser and worser.

TAO said...

I have been trying to find out who I have to submit my resume to for one of those "Death Panel" jobs...

Now, I kindly submit my resume for the provision of chief 'cord puller' to any elderly citizen of Wyoming who is contemplating ending their lives to benefit from the current estate tax situation...

Its funny that the talk is about these folks WORKING to increase the value of their estates....

Estates that are nothing more than land with natural resources. Natural resources that they did not develop but rather that appreciated in value due to demand....

K. said...

And the natural resources are theirs courtesy of the people of the United States.

Norway nationalized its offshore oil. They have strict safety standards and they're using a portion of the revenue to bolster Social Security in anticipation of an aging population. But for us to do something like that would to take away freedoms.

TAO said...

Of course it would take away our freedoms! Our freedom to BE AS STUPID AS WE WANT TO BE and our freedom TO LIVE FOR TODAY!

It also takes away from our freedom to paint ourselves as victims and to blame every on somebody else...

Foxessa said...

None of this is relevant to anything exept their expertise at saying the dumbest most outrageous sh&t they can come up with, so the media and all commentators follow lemming like to cover it and choke out everything else. They are so very, very, very good at playing this game. The dems? Entirely without a clue though the rethugz have been knocking them down for the count with these tactics since Andy Jackson. They follow and take the bait EVERY DAMNED TIME as if these ridiculous lies mattered to anyone other than to keep any other discourse from taking place. Instead of instituting real strategies and plans for the many crises, we just splutter with outrage that They Said That! (While of course comforting ourselves with our obviously great intelligence and allegience to rationality, facts and logic.)
Love, C.

K. said...

They have an easier story to tell, plus their goal is to stay in power as opposed to actually governing the country.

When someone tells you that they are for a flat tax because it is fair, try to explain convincingly that it is not in 25 words or less. You need a whiteboard to make the point.

When someone says that the federal government should tighten its belt like everyone else, you're stuck explaining that everyone else doesn't have a defense budget, a foreign policy to conduct, and a requirement to distribute entitlements that everyone wants but doesn't want to pay for.

The story with the bullet points -- or that can yank chains, however you want to put it -- always wins. At the end of the day, that's why we have Social Security, Medicare, and the Civil RIghts acts: People didn't care about the details; they just thought it was a matter of fairness (that is, until they figured out that civil rights meant integrated neighborhoods).

That's why conservatives will never get rid of the minimum wage no matter how hard they try: No one wants to think about actually having to live on $7/hr.