During the Bush/Cheney/Rove years, anyone opposing the administration was fired, defamed, outed or put on the terrorist watch list. And anyone who criticized Bush’s illegal war in Iraq was labeled unpatriotic. Everyone was fair game and nothing was out of bounds. That set the stage for today’s atmosphere of maniacal partisanship and utter lack of decorum.
Now out of power, right-wing Republicans are prone to shouting matches at rigged town hall meetings, shouting down the president at joint sessions and shouting out scary lies about anything and everything, all in an effort to obstruct much needed public policy. Much to the dismay and embarrass ment of North Carolinians, the champion of this new brand of destructive politics is Rep. Virginia Foxx.
Once a hardworking representative, Foxx has turned into a female Glenn Beck, whose off-the-wall remarks have both incited and insulted decent Americans. Foxx’s transition from public servant to public menace occurred almost overnight. True she has always been very conservative, and she was an ardent supporter of Bush’s senseless war. But as soon as President Barack Obama was sworn in this year, Foxx became a mean-spirited gaffe machine for the GOP, and was voted by fellow legislators as the second-most partisan Republican on Capitol Hill.
In trying to defeat a jobs bill, Foxx described the legislation as “teaching our people to work for the government.” This from a woman who has spent most of her life working for one public agency or another.
In April while speaking to students at North Surry High School, Foxx implied that tobacco was no more of a health risk than Mountain Dew. Then, back in Washington while trying to defeat a hate-crimes bill, she proclaimed that the murder of Matthew Shephard had nothing to do with his sexual orientation.
In July she made national headlines by suggesting that the Democrats’ health care bill would include death panels to euthanize seniors. Then, last week, Foxx added to the partisan hype by making the following outrageous statement:
“The greatest fear we all should have to our freedom comes from this room [House chamber], and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax-increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.”
Four days later, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded 30 others at the readiness center at Fort Hood, Texas. Gen. Barry McCaffrey (ret.) told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “This was a domestic terrorist attack.”
Hasan, it seems, was distraught at his impending deployment to Afghanistan to participate in a war which he opposed, and which Virginia Foxx had helped sustain. The convergence of these two personalities is tragically ironic.
Foxx told us we should fear health care reform more than terrorism because health care would cost taxpayers too much money. But one has only to look at the figures from the Congressional budget office to see the hypocrisy of Foxx’s words.
The Baucus bill, which Foxx argued against, would have cost $830 billion over 10 years, but it would also have cut the federal deficit by making health care more affordable. Meanwhile, the cost of Foxx’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is $697 billion and $230 billion respectively over a period of eight years, and experts say that amount will eventually top $2 trillion.
That means health care reform will cost less than wars we shouldn’t be fighting in the first place. The truth is, people don’t fear health care reform, they fear losing their health insurance, or not being able to pay already high premiums that insurers can still raise at will.
If I were an alarmist partisan, I would conclude that the Fort Hood massacre was Virginia Foxx’s fault for forcing Hasan into a war he opposed, then goading him into a shooting spree because she said we weren’t afraid of terrorists. But I’m not partisan. Like most of you I am an American with a brain and a shred of decency. Hasan should never have been recruited, given his incendiary writings at Virginia Tech, and he should never have been promoted, given his blogsite support of suicide bombers. Nevertheless, once he was well entrenched in the military, Hasan should never have slipped through the cracks of the very medical discipline which he practiced. He is, to use the vernacular, “crazy.” In other words, Rep. Foxx, he is a partisan.
Jim Longworth is the host of “Triad Today,” airing on Fridays at 6:30 a.m. on ABC 45 (cable channel 7) and Sundays at 10 p.m. on WMYV (cable channel 15).
