The Most Painful Video You’ll See Today

posted at 12:33 pm on April 18, 2009 by Laura
[ Politicians ]    printer-friendly

Over at Michelle Malkin’s, watch the video of Republican Congressman Gresham Barrett at a Tea Party. He was being booed, air horned, and a good portion of the crowd turned their backs on him. Oh, that wasn’t the painful part. That was actually pretty satisfying.

He doggedly continued, spewing talking points that if he’d thought about it at all, disqualified him since he voted for TARP and Porkulus. I realize he didn’t really have much choice. If he’d left the stage as the crowd demanded, that would effectively have been the end of his career. Think of the campaign ads such a moment would provide! By staying, he hoped to turn it around. But he never did. And that still wasn’t the painful part.

He insisted that he had loyally served his constituents:

You may boo, you may turn your back, but I have devoted my life to the conservative cause. And I will fight for you and I will never turn my back on you, I can promise you that.

Gee, he sounds hurt. He then inadvertently compared with crowd with liberal Democrats:

I know you might not agree, but that’s what’s great about this country. Let me tell you something, the liberal Democrats in Washington DC don’t agree either.

He floundered his way through a speech which he must have thought, when preparing for it, was a real stemwinder. It was loaded with applause points. And throughout the entire speech, instead of the expected applause, people booed and ordered him to go home.

They don’t see a problem with trillions of dollars in pork barrel spending. They don’t see a problem with raising tax levels that would make the French blush. With rewarding illegal behavior with amnesty at your expense. Racking up [inaudible] of debt. The problem they see, guys, is you. And it’s not. I respect you. I honestly do. I know we may have differences on some votes and [inaudible] deal with disagreement. But I’ll tell you one thing right now, the Obama administration, they don’t believe in you, guys. …. We must fight the Democrats on trillions of dollars of spending. We must fight them on the national debt that doubles in the next six years and triples in the next ten. We must fight the waste in the name of stimulus. And we must fight them for resurrecting the Death Tax. We have to fight, guys, and we have to win! The tyranny of excess debt must end. The gluttony of reckless spending must be stopped! And above all, taxation without hesitation must be examined, exposed, and extinguished.

And the painful part is that he doesn’t seem to recognize the GOP’s complicity, or comprehend why people are mad. Oh, the GOP isn’t keen on raising taxes, but pork? Check. Debt? Check. Waste, reckless spending and corruption? Check. And we’ve had enough.

I don’t know about this particular Congressman’s record, but the GOP does not respect us. A GOP that respected the base would have had closed primaries and better candidates than McCain and Huckabee. A GOP that respected us would have thrown Ted Stevens out of leadership with the same alacrity that they threw Trent Lott out for a manufactured scandal.*

The GOP has been going along to get along for decades. It may contain a conservative wing, but it is certainly not a conservative party. Michelle writes,

The anger at reckless spenders in Washington is palpable, deep-seated, bipartisan, nationwide, and not going away.

I bet Barrett felt betrayed, standing there being a target for that kind of hostility. Representative Barrett, welcome to the club. There’s a whole lot of us who have felt that way about the GOP for a long time.

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*I can’t stand Lott either, but there were far better reasons to remove him from leadership than a ginned-up racism scandal.

Cross posted at PH.

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