A Bedlamite Medley to Mix It Up

In August, we learned from Senator Rand Paul -- otherwise known as Senator Aqua Buddha -- that no black people that he's been able to find are having their votes suppressed. Now, from Rep. Tom McClintock, we discover that there simply is no such thing as white-collar crime.

At a town hall meeting in El Dorado Hills, California on Tuesday, a constituent asked McClintock for his "stance on Wall Street criminal practices." The congressman responded, "Well first of all, for a criminal practice there has to be a gun. It's pretty simple."

Wait, so now, if I stick somebody up with a knife, or a club, or a homemade petrol bomb, or a phony mortgage, I am not engaging in "criminal practice." Something's indeed simple here, Tom, and I don't think it's your argument.

After detailing his opposition to reforms that would curb bank risk-taking and simplify the financial system, McClintock added that bad financial decisions are the responsibility of the individual who makes them and that's "the price we pay for the freedom to make all of the good decisions in our lives."

I agree. The decision we made not to hang the presidents of every major investment bank from a lamp post by their thumbs while pelting them with rotting fruit is our responsibility and we should own the mistake. But McClintock wasn't finished. He had some anthropologizin' to do, too.

Interestingly, that provision for patriotic integration is missing from the Senate legislation. The motto of this country is e pluribus unum, and one of its meanings is "from many nations, one nation, the American nation." There's only one race here, it's the American race. And the only way you accomplish that is through assimilation. That is what our immigration laws are designed to promote, and that is precisely what illegal immigration undermines.

It's pretty damn hard to assimilate when you know that, as soon as you walk outside, you can be bundled off home by the ICE people. By the way, McClintock won re-election in 2012 with 61.1 percent of the vote. Ein Cali, ein Volk, ein Batshit, I guess.

Meanwhile, Steve Stockman of Texas, never one to miss an opportunity to prove that Being A Dick is the fundamental philosophical underpinning of modern conservative thought.

"Liberals want to bronco bust dissent," Stockman said in a press release that called the event a harmless gag. "But Texans value speech, even if its speech they don't agree with. From Molly Ivins to Louie Gohmert and every opinion in between, Texans value free and open political speech. I'm sure any rodeo in Texas would be proud to have performers."

Everyone who believes that Steve Stockman "valued" what Molly Ivins had to say about anything, please stand on your head. For example, I am sure he "valued" very highly the columnin which the late Ms. I wrote:

That's how we got Rep. Steve Stockman, our proudest contribution to the national Knot-Head Quotient, in the first place. Normal voters stayed home, the Christian right and its disciplined troops turned out in force, and whammo, we sent a hopeless dingbat off to Congress. I'm not saying that all candidates supported by the Christian right are hopeless dingbats: Stockman is special. For those of you who may have forgotten, Stockman is the glorious gun nut, militia supporter and Polluters' Best Friend who is facing a complaint to the Federal Election Commission from the 1994 campaign and will almost surely draw another this time. In '94, he took $80,000 from the Suarez Corp. of Ohio, which was out to get incumbent Jack Brooks. Stockman, according to The Beaumont Enterprise and the Houston Chronicle, lied on his resume in '92 about being an accountant, lied about having worked for IBM, lied about being a graduate of the University of Houston-Clear Lake (he did later graduate) and lied about being a computer consultant at the school.

I suspect the thing Stockman "values" most about Molly Ivins's free-speech rights is that she's dead an can't exercise them any more. It's up to the rest of us to carry on, and to point out that Stockman got 70.7 percent of the vote last time out.