OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Patrick Kennedy, heir to the fading political empire, said in a recent media therapy session that he had to leave Congress in order to sober up. “Obviously, when you’re an elected official, you have lots of people who want to endear themselves to you and not always in the most healthy way,” he told CNN, keeping alive that special Kennedy flame of personal responsibility.
“You have people all over the country who want to do you a favor, and they think they are doing you a favor if they do what you ask them,” he said. “Then you’re going to be able to go wherever you want in order to get drinking, to get any kind of medication you think you need in order to make it through.”
Patrick Kennedy may no longer be in Congress, but he can still serve as the spiritual and intellectual leader of his party when it comes to their unshakeable addiction to taking our money and spending it in the most obscene and profligate ways.
Even as we learn the grave news that Congress will bankrupt Social Security and Medicare even sooner than previously predicted, Democratic leaders maintain their hot and oily rhetoric.
Any attempt to salvage the programs and keep them from collapsing are met with bullhorn and bludgeon.
Republicans want to destroy Medicare and persecute the elderly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says.
Yes, this is the same woman who for nearly a quarter-century has taken part in stealing from our Social Security account to pay for politicians’ favored welfare programs. The same woman who, as leader of the recalcitrant party for more than 12 years, could have single-handedly brought her people to the table to act like adults and solve these serious problems before they became the full-blown crisis they are now.
Of course, no one can forget the last time that Mrs. Pelosi led her people in a spaz-out worthy of a hormonal teenager.
That was when former President Bush offered a tiny little fix to Social Security. A small fraction of the Social Security taxes you pay would have been earmarked for you in an account that could not be pried open by Congress and pillaged to pay for methadone clinics, the National Endowment for the “Arts” or whatever other crazy schemes Democratic lawmakers can invent.
Mrs. Pelosi and her band of raiders accused Mr. Bush of wanting to dismantle Social Security in some sort of giveaway to Wall Street. This wild argument became a cornerstone of the party’s presidential campaign in 2004.
It is important to remember that people like Nancy Pelosi — who is extremely wealthy — are not among those whose retirement will depend upon sound Social Security and Medicare programs. They harbor their retirement money in the very type of accounts that Mr. Bush wanted to create for the people.
If it were not so terrifying, it would be amusing how these same oblivious people ridiculed Mr. Bush and others for seeing the moral complexities of harvesting aborted fetuses for scientific experiments.
He is a simpleton opposed to science, they charged even though he was the one who saw complexities they either dishonestly ignored or are too simple to understand. (If you recall, that was another cornerstone of the Democrat’s 2004 presidential campaign.)
All the while, of course, Democratic leaders continue their criminal barbarism in their stewardship of our nation’s finances.
They may be big fans of science, but, it turns out, they are opposed to math. They are fiscal flat earthers. Or, at least, that is the only political platform from which they can justify their ongoing raids of government coffers.
• Charles Hurt’s column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
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