Submitted by Tom on Wed, 2010-02-17 09:00
Another terrific letter from Eric Fralick in the Des Moines Register:
When President Obama, addressing House Republicans, said he was tired of seeing Republicans showing up at ribbon-cuttings for projects they'd voted against, he might have been speaking directly to the 4th District's Tom Latham, who had funding for seven district projects written into last year's stimulus bill, voted against the bill, then took credit for each one.
Now Latham, who along with his Republican congressional soulmates plunged the country into the greatest recession of modern times with 12 years of financial deregulation and borrow-and-spend legislation, has reinvented himself as an outside-the-Beltway populist and fiscal watchdog.
His and his friends' solutions? The same tax relief for families and small businesses Obama has proposed, and which Latham and his friends will presumably vote against, opposition to Obama's taxes on bailed-out banks and bringing back Sen. Charles Grassley's old chestnut, privatization of Medicare and Medicaid.
Apart from old, failed ideas, Republican congressional strategy, like that of their most extreme and irrational supporters, has devolved into temper tantrums, obstructionism and misrepresentation at a time when the country needs cooperation and levelheadedness for its very survival.
- Eric Fralick, Ames