Senator Craig's world

Our senior Idaho Senator, Larry Craig, just published an Opinion piece in our weekly paper, The Bonners Ferry Herald. The title of this somewhat questionable piece is "Where is the Fiscal Responsibility?" Seeing this headline I assumed he was going to criticize the current administration for blowing an enormous budget surplus and turning it into the greatest national debt ever. I should have known better. It is a piece critcizing Democrats (the usual Republican crap about tax and spend). It makes me wonder if he has lost his mind. He says, for example, "Republicans, myself included, define fiscal responsibility as keeping taxes low and managing the growth of government spending. Democrats define it as raising taxes to increase spending." He is apparently unaware of the national debt and the fact that government spending has increased dramatically during the Bush/Cheney administration. So where has he been for the past seven years? I guess he wants to keep taxes low to insure that fewer children will get medical treatment, returning veterans get short-changed, more bridges will fail, we will continue to have forty million plus with no medical insurance, and etc. And of course he doesn't comment on making the rich richer and the poor poorer when he speaks of his tax policies. Given the facts of the matter I find his editorial insulting. No one who supports the Bush/Cheney administration (as Craig does slavishly) has any business lecturing anyone about fiscal responsibility. This Republican administration has been the most fiscally irresponsible in all of our history. It's been just borrow and spend, borrow, borrow, borrow, and spend, spend, spend. Indeed, Cheney said early on that we have learned from Saint Ronald that deficits don't matter. I guess he won't be around to explain that to our children and grandchildren, who will have to pay for his illegal war and blatant war profiteering. Craig's views on this matter are not only insulting, they are completely absurd.

Having followed Craig's not very illustrious career in the Senate I have developed an idea of how he thinks (or, more properly, doesn't think). I once received a letter from him that, among other things, claimed that we might still find WMD's in Iraq. This was after everyone, including Bush himself, had admditted there were no WMD's! I believe that Craig has certain ideas about things that he retains and promotes in spite of the reality around him or any recent developments or conditions. He actually believes that it is as simple as Democrats tax and spend and Republicans are fiscally responsible. This of course has no connection with reality, but he continues to believe it. His voting record indicates the same shortcoming. He just automatically votes for whatever Bush/Cheney desire because, after all, they are Republicans and Republicans are good while Democrats are not good. He's exactly like my mother-in-law who doesn't follow politics, or even the news, has no idea whatsoever about what is going on, but faithfully votes Republican in every election, "because that's what she and her late husband always did." But Larry Craig is a Senator, couldn't we expect more? I believe it is time for this dinosaur of a Senator to step down and leave the job to someone who is more aware of the world around him or her.

LKBIQ:
"Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens."
Michel Montaigne