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| florida mike532!... |
 Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 12:51 am |
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Florida Republican Party Rotting From Top Down
Wondering just how callous and self-serving political ambition can
get? Try asking Florida's part-time Republican governor-turned U.S.
Senate candidate, Charlie Crist. Or quiz the state's occasional
Attorney General-turned GOP gubernatorial candidate, Bill McCollum.
Make note that you may have trouble finding either one of them.
Recent
reports show that in recent years, Crist takes off the equivalent of
about 10 weeks a year, while McCollum takes an average of more than
14
weeks off annually. To be fair, the presumptive Democratic nominee
for
governor, Florida's Chief Financial Officer, Alex Sink, is reported
to
have taken off an average of about 9 weeks a year over the same time
frame as McCollum.
Yet the work schedules of the governor and cabinet of this vast,
complex and problem-riddled state are not the real issue - just some
modern, bipartisan political context worth consideration.
The real issue has to do with comportment, with how you handle
yourself when you are in fact in the very public process of putting
in
your face time, doing your job, serving at the very highest levels of
state government and theoretically representing the best overall
interests of all of your constituents - even when you are consumed
with running for that next office, as is now the case with Florida's
governor, AG and CFO.
The real issue has to do with the damaging, downright demagogic way
that the two Republican “leaders” have been comporting themselves in
recent months, regarding the tortuous efforts to enact meaningful
national health reform, including a new public option health plan
that
can compete with private, for-profit insurance plans in the free
market.
Mind you, these haven't just been the efforts of President Obama and
most Democrats in Congress, but also the tireless, unpaid endeavors
of
countless thousands of concerned citizens in Florida, and all across
America.
Since Crist's labeling a while back of these efforts as “cockamamie”,
it appears that he has logged a full workday recently enough to
understand that those cockamamie efforts are finally coming to
fruition. So instead of sounding smugly dismissive, Crist is now
focusing his attack squarely on the public option part of the puzzle.
Think this shameless attempt to appease the anti-government, tea-
bagging base of his wounded but still dangerous animal of a political
party might have something to do with right wing zealot Marco Rubio
well on his way to turning what was supposed to be a Crist cakewalk
to
the Republican senatorial nomination into a dogfight?
From the governor, this week: "My view of it is, the public option, I
think,may be sort of a Trojan horseto a government takeover of health
care and I think our administration has demonstrated that that's not
what we favor, nor is it what Floridians really want. I think they
want good options in the private sector that offer good, affordable
health care.”
Right, “good options in the private sector”, like Crist's
embarrassing
2009 Cover Florida initiative, a bogus, ineffective attempt to help
the 4 million-plus Floridians with no health insurance. This shameful
pass on real reform has yet to sign up even 5,000 people in nearly a
year of existence - and yet Charlie keeps publicly pointing to it as
his version of “good affordable health care”.
It would be laughable if it wasn't so disgraceful, a cavalier, gross
and repeated misrepresentation of a phony solution to a genuine life-
and-death problem - not only for the nearly 25% of Floridians who are
already uninsured, but also for the millions more who are one major
accident, illness, layoff or benefit cut away from joining them.
Governor Crist's disingenuous streak has been apparent for some time.
But the reprehensible tone and tenor of the governor's recent remarks
on arguably the single most important public policy matter of our
time
should help to finally deconstruct the oh-so-carefully constructed
myth of him as a “moderate” Republican worthy of crossover support.
And it should also help get a man of character and integrity,
Democratic Congressman Kendrick Meek, elected as Florida's next
United
States Senator.
And then there's the nauseating case of the top law enforcement
official in Florida, AG Bill McCollum, the guy who as a congressman
in
the 1990s helped lead extremist Republican efforts to impeach
President Bill Clinton, and was rated as having one of the worst
voting records in Congress on little things like environmental
protection and gun control. And that's just scratching the surface on
the ridiculously inglorious career of this radical right wing lifer
of
a useless politician.
So, with that background in mind, here's what Wild Bill had to say
about Democratic health reform efforts back in September: ''You're
proposing that everyone have a socialized government plan that limits
my choice of a patient and doctor, my choice of insurance, and
limiting the care you're going to get"''
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Florida-Republican-Party-R-by-Daniel... |
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