50 shades of GOP

Once again this past week we were reminded of how elitists think laws should govern the lives of everyone else but themselves. These proponents of big government, who look down upon the values of “real Americans”, believe they are simply above having to practice what they preach for the rest of us.

Those values they dismiss so handily are honesty, liberty and equality, and the particular government-loving miscreants we’re discussing are of course not “big spending liberals” as the Right will tell you, but authoritarian and hypocritical conservatives.

First we had a new entry for the Larry Craig Memorial Award, an honourific that comes with no red-carpet flash, no pomp and circumstance. It does arrive, however, with a simple acknowledgment that yet another Republican is all too happy to patrol our bedrooms and doctors’ offices like they’re Checkpoint Charlie, but thinks they should be able to behave however they damn please in their own lives. Sometimes by doing a Fred Astaire routine at the Minneapolis Airport.

In this case, however, we’re talking about the illustrious Representative Scott Desjarlais of Tennessee, a virulently anti-choice Republican who’s just gaga about “life” from the moment he’s determined it begins in his big brain. Did I mention he’s also a doctor who ran and won office as a Tea Party Republican, but had an affair with a patient and later pressured her to get an abortion? Take your time, and read that again, you know, just for the kicks.

Of course, Desjarlais is obviously an exception when it comes to the whole having-an-affair-while-preaching-Pat-Buchanan’s-version-of-Christian morality for everyone else – the little people, for whom they’d advocate a proper stoning if they did it. Because we haven’t seen similar behaviour from the likes of right wing politicians, preachers and pundits, say Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Chip Pickering, Mark Sanford, Ted Haggard, David Vitter, Dan Burton, Neil Bush, Ken Calvert, Charles Canady, Bernie Kerik, Sue Myrick, Jimmy Swaggart, Bill Thomas, Vito Fossella, Don Sherwood, Bob Livingston, Ed Schrock, Dr David Hager, Helen Chenowith and Randy “Duke” Cunningham, give or take a few thousand prominent conservatives.

Right-wing uber-hack and voter fraud conspiracy-monger John Fund gets a special mention here, having had the affair and also, like Desjarlais, pressured the affairee to terminate her pregnancy. It sure is grand, that ole party.

Then there was little Alex P Keaton in this week’s vice presidential debate, so earnest and eager to join the big boy’s table when he finished his chocolate milk and Chips Ahoy. Pursing his lips with such aplomb, our friend Paul Ryan did, so we’d know the Congressman from Wisconsin was just so disappointed every time another out-and-out fabrication of his was disemboweled by Vice President Joe Biden.

Sadly, for young Ryan, he chose to challenge Biden on being one of those terrible, no good, very bad wasteful big government boogeymen. Why Biden and his running mate’s stimulus was all for naught, according to Ryan, a waste of money not seen on this scale since some of the floating parts in Rick Perry’s cerebral cortex told him, “gosh darn, I’d make a swell Preznit.”

Inconveniently, Biden pointed out the two fine letters Mr Ryan – psst, don’t call him Congressman, because that would remind us that he’s part of a body that has an approval rating sailing just past Jerry Sandusky – wrote to the Vice President outright begging for stimulus funds to create jobs.

In fact, as revealed by the Associated Press, what Ryan’s done is far more cynical and hypocritical than previously known. Here is a summary of what they found:

“…almost 9,000 pages of correspondence between Ryan’s congressional office and dozens of federal agencies and departments in which Ryan repeatedly sought millions of dollars for his own constituents, often culled from programmes that Ryan is now campaigning to reduce or eliminate entirely.”

Shameless. There is no other way to describe Paul Ryan. Unless you want to go with early-onset dementia.

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his faculties though – which could be called a rather large leap of faith after seeing his boy-band tryout photos from his exciting workout sessions in Time Magazine.

That’s likely why he stuttered and stammered so much when Biden pointed out his deception that his tongue seemed like the only muscle that had missed his last P90X workout.

Desjarlais and Ryan, quality reminders of what happens when you allow supremely unserious and elitist hypocrites to gain power. They hate “big government” when it interferes with their political or personal ambitions, but when it suits them, it will come raining down on you like the wake from one of Mitt Romney’s wave runners.

Cliff Schecter is an author, pundit and public relations strategist whose firm Libertas, LLC handles media relations for political, corporate and non-profit clients. 

Follow him on Twitter: @CliffSchecter