November 13th / 15th, 2009
"Foxx and Fort Hood"
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when elected officials could
disagree without being disagreeable. They could deliberate without being
disrespectful. John F. Kennedy and Senator Barry Goldwater were political
adversaries, yet the two were good friends, and had planned to campaign
together in 1964, performing whistle stop debates throughout the country. Ronald
Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neil squared off on politics by day, but dined and
drank together by night. Somewhere along the way things turned ugly in
D.C., and civility became a lost art.
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 embarrassment
of North Carolinians, the champion of this new brand of destructive
politics is Congresswoman Virginia Foxx.
Once a hard-working representative for her constituents, Foxx has turned
into a female Glenn Beck, whose off-the-wall remarks have both incited and
insulted decent Americans. Mrs. 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 Mr. Bush’s senseless war. But as
soon as 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’
healthcare bill would include death panels to euthanize seniors. Then, last week on
November 2, 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 healthcare 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, Major Nidal Malik Hasan walked into the readiness center
at Fort Hood, Texas, and murdered thirteen people while wounding thirty others.
Retired General Barry McCaffrey 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 healthcare reform more than terrorism because
healthcare 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 had argued against, would have cost $830
Billion dollars over ten years, but it would also have cut the federal deficit by
making healthcare more affordable. Meanwhile, the cost of Mrs. Foxx’s wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan is $697 Billion and $230 Billion dollars respectively over a
period of eight years, and experts say that amount will eventually top two Trillion
dollars.
That means healthcare reform will cost less than wars we shouldn’t be
fighting in the first place. The truth is, people don’t fear healthcare reform, they
fear losing their health insurance, or not being able to pay already-high premiums which
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 Mr. 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 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. Never the less, 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 Mrs. Foxx, he is a partisan.
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