Last year, the United States elected a host of idiots and buffoons to national and state offices. Nationwide, the country has been overrun with right wing lunatics that would make Reagan look like a bleeding heart in comparison.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., for example, is obsessed with the idea of investigating American Muslims for supporting terrorism and generally being a spooky, disloyal people.
Florida’s Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott turned down $2.4 billion in President Barack Obama high-speed rail money, a move so unprovoked and unpopular with his own party that a bipartisan and veto-proof gang of lawmakers is going to request it anyway.
South Dakota briefly flirted with a law that would make it legal to murder doctors who perform abortion under the guise of “justifiable homicide.” The theory goes, if this guy’s gonna murder some babies, we gotta get to him first.
Of course, whether it’s okay to murder the presumptive murderers of other murderers to prevent the original murderers from getting murdered was never considered.
Nowhere are the shenanigans more evident than Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker (what is it with these guys and the name Scott).
Facing a $137 million budget deficit, Walker piled on an additional $140 million in tax breaks for large corporations and then decided to fill up this hole by busting Wisconsin’s public employee unions.
Keep in mind; Wisconsin is the birthplace of the (formerly) great American labor union. The recent Egypt-style protests there are a testament to the fighting spirit of the folks who got you the five-day workweek and the eight-hour workday.
This guy even axed the University of Wisconsin’s new biomass boiler, a power plant upgrade which would lessen the university’s dependence on foreign fossil fuel imports by burning switchgrass, woodchips, and other leftovers grown in Wisconsin.
Although an expensive investment, it would’ve been cheaper in the long run to operate and maintain than a natural gas boiler. A real conservative wouldn’t be so quick to sell out a capital investment that would lower costs for the state in the long run.
A clown ass governor, beholden to the fringe right and his corporate bosses, would do it in a heartbeat to score cheap points with “fiscal conservatives.” Don’t even get me started about Walker’s plan to sell Wisconsin’s state-operated power plants at fire sale prices.
How did this happen? How did the very sensible Cheeseheads of Wisconsin elect Darth Vader? Easy: Voters stayed home. An apathetic political culture pretty much enables the vocal crazies who _do_ turn out and vote to dictate the agenda.
It happened in 1994 when fresh Republican majorities in the House and Senate arrested Clinton’s march of progress and forced him to adopt a more conservative agenda. All of this because people who turned out the first time didn’t come out for the sequel.
Of course, things have scarcely gotten better since 2008. The Democrats squandered nearly veto proof majorities to pass watered down bills. But how does electing people hell-bent on dismantling the government and America as we know it going to help?
