The RTD’s Wes Hester recounts the week in political sniping between senatorial candidates George Allen and Tim Kaine, and along the way, we find Mr. Kaine’s spokehuman, Brandi Hoffine, blaming the tea party mindset for nearly causing a government shutdown.
Oh, the humanity.
But let’s unpack a bit of the Kaine campaign’s hyperbole to see if there’s any truth hiding inside:
By siding with the Tea Party in calling for disaster funding to be offset – a position he’s never held before and one his own Republican Governor disagrees with – Allen put election politics ahead of Virginia families in recovering communities.”
We can dismiss the first remark as political shorthand. There is no “Tea Party,” though there are a few hucksters who desperately want us to believe otherwise.
Has Mr. Allen never before called for spending offsets? Perhaps not. But I’m willing to accept converts to the cause wherever they may arise.
Does Allen’s position differ from that of Gov. McDonnell? On the surface, yes. But at root, both men agree the federal spending must be reduced.
Does any of this mean that Allen is putting his electoral needs ahead of suffering Virginians? Of course not. But the Kaine campaign’s statement is based upon an assumption that there is no way, at all, to offset increased federal disaster spending.
As a mild corrective, I strongly suggest the Kainiacs take a look at Sen. Tom Coburn’s Pork Report. In the month of September alone, Coburn’s staff identified over $81 billion in wasteful government spending — from the Department of Agriculture’s recipe finder website to a survey, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, asking people about God’s role in the economy.
There are much bigger items in Coburn’s list — loans to Solyndra, the waste of one out of every four dollars spent on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan…but you get the idea.
The federal government fritters away billions of dollars on projects big, small and in between each day, yet we are supposed to believe that attempting to curtail any of this waste before increasing spending elsewhere in the budget is beyond the pale.
And some in the political class have the gall to wonder why the public holds them in such low esteem…
