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05/21/2004: Asshat of the Week Asshat of the Week

Hastert Lectures McCain on War, Sacrifice
from The Associated Press

McCain, who spent five years in a North Vietnamese prison, excoriated fellow Republicans on Tuesday for pushing more tax cuts while U.S. troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Throughout our history, wartime has been a time of sacrifice. ... What have we sacrificed?" McCain said. "As mind-boggling as expanding Medicare has been, nothing tops my confusion for cutting taxes during wartime. I don't remember ever in the history of warfare when we cut taxes."

Asked Wednesday about McCain's remarks, Hastert, who was rejected for military service because of a bad shoulder, first joked: "Who? Where's he from? A Republican?" That Hastert is a funny guy!

Then, more seriously, he said: "If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda (Because McCain obviously did not discover anything about sacrifice when he was bleeding out his ass from dysentery for five years). There's the sacrifice in this country. We're trying to make sure that they have the ability to fight this war, that they have the wherewithal to be able to do it. And at the same time, we have to react to keep this country strong not only militarily but economically. We want to be able to have the flexibility to do it. That's my reply to John McCain."

McCain stood fast in his reply to Hastert.

"The speaker is correct in that nothing we are called upon to do comes close to matching the heroism of our troops," he said. "All we're called upon to do is not spend our nation into bankruptcy while our soldiers risk their lives. I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility." AMEN!

The conflict erupted as Hastert laid down a budget making it easier to pass future tax cuts regardless of their impact on the federal deficit. Brilliant! Deficit spending is fun. While we are at it, why do we not make it easier for people who are already in debt to get more credit cards. McCain and a group of GOP moderates in the Senate want to rein in deficits by making tax cuts harder.

This article is wrong on so many levels. For brevities sake:

  1. Does anyone else think Hastert is an imbecile?
  2. Would someone else with more than an elementary understanding of finance like to chime in on why it is a good/bad idea to make it easier to pass tax cuts regardless of their impact on the federal deficit?


Friday the 21st of May, IBNR noted:


POINT # 2 - Complicated explanation more than happy to discuss offline.


Friday the 21st of May, santo26 noted:


dennis hastert became the speaker of the house after reps. newt gingrich and bob livingston had to step down due to the revelations of their sexual lives during the clinton impeachment. gingrich, if you may recall was the leader of the 1994 "Republican Revolution" on a platform of cutting government spending. gingrich and clinton tried to one- up each other with spending cuts (remember the 1996 government shutdown?) until the budget was pretty much balanced by 1998. when hastert came in, he just turned on the spigot to the pork trough like tip o'neil before him, and so now the "limited government" party is, in the words of sen. mc cain, "spending money like a bunch of drunken sailors."

i mean, look at hastert: was he separated at birth from the tipster?