What’s In My Interest?

I had the impres­sion sev­er­al days ago that momen­tum for health care reform slowed down some while Pres­i­dent Oba­ma was over­seas. A lot of the news in the past cou­ple of days has been that reform will only get done if the Pres­i­dent is active­ly work­ing to push it through congress.

I was also under the impres­sion that most Repub­li­cans would pre­fer that health care not pass.

And yet…

He [for­mer Sen­a­tor Zell Miller] drew more applause from the most­ly Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors …when he said Oba­ma need­ed to spend more time in Wash­ing­ton and less time trav­el­ing abroad. “Our globe-trot­ting pres­i­dent needs to stop and take a break and quit gal­li­vant­i­ng around,” Miller said, adding that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel needs to put “Goril­la Glue” on his chair to keep him in the Oval Office.

Ignor­ing the pos­si­ble racial slur here, I don’t under­stand the applause. If the Repub­li­cans want health reform to fail, then I would think they would not want the Pres­i­dent glued to his chair in the oval office, but would pre­fer him fly­ing around the globe.

Unless it was the racial slur.…

Hat tip to The New Republic

2 thoughts on “What’s In My Interest?”

  1. If Wash­ing­ton can gov­ern Hawaii from where it’s at, I fail to see how Oba­ma being else­where affects his abil­i­ty to run things, espe­cial­ly giv­en the cur­rent state of elec­tron­ic con­nect­ed­ness of, well, just about everything.

    Also, I’m not sure what “racial slur” was used. I checked “gal­li­vant­i­ng” to see if it had some sort of racism in its ety­mol­o­gy, but it does­n’t, so I’m left with “Goril­la Glue” and the pos­si­ble asso­ci­a­tion of a black man with a goril­la. If that’s the case, then I guess it’s pos­si­ble it was used racial­ly, but Goril­la Glue is the go-to glue for get­ting things to stick. I use it as a sug­ges­tion when­ev­er some­thing needs glued — much like I would use duct tape if ever some­thing is mov­ing that should­n’t be.

    So per­haps Sen­a­tor Miller was just think­ing like me.

    Unless he had some­thing racist in mind, in which case, he can duct tape his mouth shut.

  2. Gov­ern­ing the coun­try from Wash­ing­ton is not at all anal­o­gous to try­ing to ride herd on con­gress to pass a par­tic­u­lar bill.

    The for­mer is done through the exist­ing infra­struc­ture of the var­i­ous fed­er­al depart­ments. The lat­ter requires lots of face time with var­i­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tives and senators.

    Since Miller was address­ing leg­is­la­tors, it is rea­son­able to assume that the audi­ence under­stood that Oba­ma’s absence from Wash­ing­ton would make pass­ing health care less likely.

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