Picked this up from Kos: Grover Norquist’s Diseased Mind
“This is somewhere in between Baghdad and fixing the flood in Louisiana,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said, comparing the GM decision to major stumbles by former President George W. Bush. Obama “has decided to take this over. He now owns it.”
For Norquist, the takeover of GM could be great news for the Republican Party, ranking somewhere between the war in Iraq, where 4,311 U.S. servicemen and women and tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives, and Hurricane Katrina, where more than 1,800 Americans died, because it could hurt President Obama politically.
This spurred me to actually read the politico article that the blog entry linked, where I also uncovered this gem by Eric Cantor:
“I know that I don’t want Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid designing the car that I drive, and I don’t think any New Yorker — or any American — does, either,” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said in a New York radio interview Thursday. “Washington, the president, Congress, none … has any business running that car company. They’ll run it into the ground.”
I can’t imagine a politician doing this deliberately to rile up his base, because the words coming out of his mouth are so stupid that I assume he must be sincere to say these things.
One: “Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid designing the car that I drive” is such an obnoxious, stupid, and purposeful misrepresentation of what’s going on that I have to think that anyone who didn’t really believe it would think to themselves “Aw, I can’t say this bullshit.”
Two: “They’ll run it into the ground.” They’ll run it into the ground? IT’S ALREADY IN THE GROUND! IT’S BANKRUPT! The whole reason the people who have “no business” running the company are in charge because the people who Cantor presumably means did have “business” fucked it up. And for fuck’s sake, it’s not like you need to know how to service an engine or spot-weld in order to run a car company. Business is business: Do things that make money, stop doing things that don’t, keep your employees and the community happy.
If Sergio Marchionne can take over Fiat despite having never even worked at an auto company before and turn them from so bad that GM paid them $2 billion to buy out of the company’s purchase, to a profitable company two years later, to one that five years later is so profitable it’s BUYING CHRYSLER while GM is going bankrupt and being taken over by the government… then, well, why the hell can’t an ownership group the people have elected themselves do the same thing? I’m sure if you asked Eric Cantor’s “average American”, he’d rather have someone he voted for running the company than the same greedy good-ol’-boy retread yahoos who ran it into the ground in the first place.
Back to Norquist for a second. The same guy who is excited the government bought GM because he sees it as a political bungle on the scale of Iraq and Katrina (with no regard for the lives lost in either) is the same guy who said his goal was to get government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Notwithstanding that Norquist is one of the most nakedly greedy and petty minds the right has1 (petty = wanting the government to fail for meager political gain and not understanding the the whole fucking system is on the verge of collapse), who fucking talks and thinks like that? “Drown it in the bathtub?” Is that your fantasy, Grover? Do you derive some sick pleasure from ending the lives of small, helpless things?
Because you know what I think of when I think “drowned in the bathtub”? I think of small children and animals. You know, the sort of things a stuffy middle-aged white dude could successfully overpower long enough to hold underwater. I would guess Norquist spent some part of his childhood torturing animals in one form or another. Like, I can’t even imagine how else that metaphor would jump out to you unless you harbored thoughts of drowning small, helpless living beings. Of ending a life in a naked exercise of power, because you feel so utterly powerless, you impotent, ineffectual, weak man.
Grover Norquist is a mean, power-hungry sociopath. The value of human life– of any life– means nothing to him. Nothing to him matters but the number in his bank account.
1 – And I love him for it. Far from being offended by his speech, I’m glad he’s so clearly outed himself as a sociopath. I’m thankful he’s free to expose the agenda the Republicans don’t want to talk about; namely, that they don’t give a shit about you or your quality of life, but toss a few bucks your way and say some things about Jesus and you’ll let them run wild and do whatever the fuck they want. So of course he would say something like he did about GM– since the modern Republican Party’s policies are so grossly self-serving, and their ranks so incompetent (ref: the Bush Administration), their only hope of winning office is for the other side to fuck up long enough for people to vote for them. Preach on, brother Grover!
