A help-me-out hangout on the pandemic experience » « The Cutty Sark has fallen on hard times

Susan Collins is objectively more evil than Joe Lieberman

And Lieberman is pretty ding-danged evil. This is, I presume, an excerpt from The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, which describes all the backroom maneuvering that went on to get Obama’s stimulus bill passed. It’s what our politicians do that tells us most about their character, not what they say to the press, and whoa, was Collins behind some awful policy decisions.

So…she hates education, refusing to fund school construction, and she wanted to “kill outright” all preparations for a pandemic. When Joe Lieberman is begging you to be slightly less wicked, you know you’re a bad person, and Joe Lieberman is the earthly manifestation of centrism.

That brings back bad memories of how awful the Republicans were during the Obama administration, and now they’re even worse.

Scratch out the word “economy” and replace it with “pandemic response”, and it’s still true.

A help-me-out hangout on the pandemic experience » « The Cutty Sark has fallen on hard times

Comments

  1. says

    That is interesting. First it was apparently more or less secret so the rest of us didn’t know about it. And second that Collins managed to keep her reputation as a moderate for quite a while afterwards. On the other hand people from Maine have been electing complete nut cases to state wide offices for some time, so perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered.

  2. microraptor says

    You’ve really screwed up as a politician if you can be truthfully said to be worse than Lieberman.

  3. jfarmer017 says

    So long as we are rank-ordering evil, where does Obama’s assassination of a 16-year-old American kid in Yemen or his destruction of Libya place?

  4. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 1

    On the other hand people from Maine have been electing complete nut cases to state wide offices for some time…

    Well, in their defense, folks in Maine have a lot issues stressing them out: Rabid Saint Bernards. telekinetic teenage girls, vampires, backwoods pet burial grounds that raise the dead, shape-shifting Lovecraftian gods who disguise themselves a clowns and eat children… It’s bound to drive anyone to vote Republican.

  5. consciousness razor says

    Susan Collins certainly wasn’t alone. New York Post, Feb. 8 2009:

    The Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele, yesterday called the bill “uncontrolled spending.”

    “Democrats have controlled both branches of the government for less than a month and you have to wonder if all that power has gone to their heads,” he said in the GOP’s weekly address. “They’ve been trying to force a massive spending bill through Congress under the guise of economic relief.”

    He argued that increased tax cuts, rather than government spending, were the only solution – an approach President Obama dismissed as having already been a failure.

    Tax cuts for the wealthy are always the only solution to everything, according to Republicans. But it doesn’t end there either….

    For New York, the bill represented a resounding victory, Sen. Charles Schumer said.

    No seriously: just wait for the punchline. It doesn’t end there….

    “This is the first bill in a very long time where New York gets back more than we put in and on every major issue New York did very, very well,” the Democrat said.

    If the bill remains unchanged, New York state stands to get $5 billion for Medicaid, $1.5 billion in cash for mass transit, $1 billion for police departments and billions more for road and bridge projects.

    “There was an attempt on the floor to cut New York’s money and we defeated it,” Schumer said. “New Yorkers can feel proud and walk tall because the federal government is coming to our aid in a way commensurate with our needs, as opposed to helping the rest of the country and sort of giving crumbs to New York.”

    New York City’s budget would get $1.4 billion in Medicaid relief, $100 million for the NYPD, and billions for infrastructure, including the Second Avenue Subway and Fulton Street Transit Center.

    “This will be real relief for New York City,” the senator said. “It doesn’t mean there won’t be any pain. But it means instead of using a meat ax, they [the city government] can use a scalpel.”

    For anyone keeping track at home, those items, explicitly described in terms of how they benefit New York and NYC specifically, are not to be regarded as pork barrel spending. Of course not. Don’t be absurd. He just proudly says that they are, but he doesn’t mean that they are.

    He said the compromise hammered out between Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans – which has enough support to get it past any threat of a filibuster – was far better than that passed by the House on Jan. 29.

    “All those little porky things that the House put in, the money for the [National] Mall or the sexually transmitted diseases or the flu pandemic, they’re all out,” Schumer said.

    Uh, right….. Only those deep in the pocket of Big Sexually Transmitted Disease™ or Big Flu Pandemic™ were fighting for porky things like that. (And those are totally like spending money on the National Mall.) Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who at the time was Vice Chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus and Chair of the Senate Rules Committee, was not one of them.

  7. says

    I don’t think she was more evil than Joe Lieberman, just less concerned about what public opinion would say. Joe, after all, went along with it and didn’t make this public, and even explicitly changed parties to avoid opposing people like her.

    (What is it with Democrats named Joe? Lieberman, Manchin, Biden — it’s like the name takes over and compels them to become worthless.)

  8. says

    @#6, Marcus Ranum:

    $1bn is less than 0.07% of what the government spontaneously put into the stock market as “stimulus” just a few days ago to try to protect the rich. Budget concerns aren’t just misplaced, they’re fictional — clearly, we can do anything we want whenever we want to.

  9. Pierce R. Butler says

    The Vicar … @ # 7: What is it with Democrats named Joe?

    Oddly, the US has never had a president named Joseph: 6 James (counting Jimmy Carter), and 4 Johns, but never (yet) a Joe.