After going after Terry Crowley’s views on Obama voters, I simply can’t give Vern Nelson a free pass after his puff piece on inept Congressman Henry Waxman. I believe it was Martin Luther King Jr. who wrote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
With that in mind I’m going to say that “Idiocy anywhere is a threat to competency everywhere.”
It’s funny Vern would tout Representative Henry Waxman because just the other day I was thinking to myself how Henry Waxman is just a waste of space and taxpayer dollars. I’m not trying to pick on Henry Waxman, I’m not trying to pick on Democrats or the Democrat Party. I am just trying to point out that a lot of Politicians on the National Level are buffons that have been in Office way too long. They are both Reeps and Dems and the American People continously give them a free pass.
The first time I can remember being disgusted with Henry Waxman was when I watched the Documentary “The Last Cigarette.” The Documentary is about the House Meetings when they questioned all of the Big Tobacco Executives in Congress back in 1994. Kind of like the real version of the movie “Thank You For Smoking.” We as Americans had the opportunity to see our tax dollars at work. Waxman went through the trouble of asking the Executives questions as difficult as these: “Are cigarettes addictive?” “Do cigarettes cause cancer?” “Do people die every year due to cigarette smoking?” Thanks for looking out Hank.
I don’t know if that meeting was all Rep. Waxman’s idea but he was the chairman of the Committee and he was the face that bore the blunt of my anger. By the way he has a face that only a mother would love. He kind of looks like Bob Barr’s bald, evil cousin.
I simply could not believe that we had to have a Congressional Hearing on the dangers of cigarette smoking. I could not believe that my tax dollars were being spent on that. For those of you that would like to see the movie for yourselves it is available on instant viewing on Netflix.
What really sent me over the edge was another Documentary that I saw called “Bigger Stronger Faster,” and it was about steroids. I would tell you about the clip but I would rather let you see for yourselves (see the YouTube clip above).
Yeah that’s right. Waxman is so clueless that he doesn’t even know what the legal drinking age is in this Country. Like I said earlier I’m not trying to pick on Waxman or the Dems or Vern Nelson. My point is that these are the type of people we put into office year after year and we wonder why we get no results. These clueless inept politicans that are totally disconnected from the American people are plentiful in Congress and they come from both parties.
The late great George Carlin said it best: “Where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents, and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities and they’re elected by American Citizens. This is the best we can do folks, this is what we have to offer, it’s what our system produces. Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens you are going to get selfish, ignorant leaders…maybe it’s not the politicans who suck, maybe something else sucks around here…like the public.”
Game on. When I have time. If you don’t see how very simple questions like the above can be an important part of making a case in court or in a hearing, then I can’t help. But I’ll be back with reams of great things Waxman has done. Gotta run right now…
Luchie, I respect your independence and skepticism, and consider you a voice of reason here, and I understand the temptation to try to attack both parties or “sides” equally. But you can fall into the trap that the mainstream media often does of false “objectivity” – pretending that the truth exists somewhere right in between one totally-full-of-it side and one reasonably truthful side.
In your case you must see that while it was easy as pie to poke Crowley’s Obama-voters-are-stupid story full of holes, you’ve done nothing to debunk my “puff piece” on what progress it is for the Energy & Commerce chairmanship to go from Dingell to Waxman.
Your critique of Waxman, apart from that he looks funny which nobody has ever denied, is that he is “inept” and “ignorant.” Your examples don’t fly.
The simple questions you quote him asking tobacco executives were perfectly pertinent; the point was these executives had been consciously lying to consumers for decades about the dangers of smoking. (“The Last Cigarette” sounds like a good movie; you have seen “The Insider” haven’t you? It might make more sense of those hearings for you.)
Then supposedly he’s foolish in the video you posted because he doesn’t know offhand drinking and smoking ages; do you? I had to look it up myself – there are 19 states where you can drink before you’re 21; in most states you can smoke when you’re 18 but some you can’t till you’re 19. In the video he threw this out as a sort of example and double-checked with his aide to make sure he was right; it didn’t sound particularly ignorant to me.
And I’ve never heard him called “inept.” You may not agree with all his positions, but on his record and skill as a legislator, I can’t do better than quote Harold Meyerson:
…Waxman is a legislative genius. Most of his legislative accomplishments came before the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, when he chaired the health and environment subcommittee of Energy and Commerce. Progressive legislating has been pretty much off the table since then, which is why he shifted focus to Congress’s chief investigative committee. Those who have served in Congress for fewer than 14 years weren’t around when Waxman greatly strengthened the Clean Air Act and authored the legislation that expanded Medicaid coverage to the poorest children (enlisting Republican abortion-foe Henry Hyde as his partner in the effort). They didn’t see Waxman steer to passage the bills that gave rise to the generic drug industry, required uniform nutrition labels on food, heightened standards of care at nursing homes, created screening programs for breast and cervical cancer, provided health care for people with HIV/AIDS, or expanded Medicaid coverage to the working poor.
In the midst of the Reagan era’s cutbacks, Waxman expanded the number of working poor eligible for Medicaid a stunning 24 times. He consistently won key Republican backing for these regulatory and programmatic expansions. In fact, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page ran a series of articles complaining of “the Waxman state,” in which, horror of horrors, businesses were compelled to meet environmental and consumer protection standards. Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson once emerged from a marathon conference committee meeting and noted, “Henry Waxman is tougher than a boiled owl.”
Some of Waxman’s achievements were to keep bad things from happening. For virtually the entire 1980s, Waxman blocked Dingell and the Reagan administration from weakening auto emission standards. At one point, he blocked a key vote on a bill to debilitate the Clean Air Act by introducing 600 amendments, which he had wheeled into the room in shopping carts. Waxman also led the war on secondhand cigarette smoke. He publicized an obscure EPA report that established secondhand smoke as a carcinogen, uncovered the onetime Philip Morris lab director who had determined that nicotine was addictive, and publicly grilled tobacco company CEOs about their failure to share that fact with the public.
By 1994, Robert Greenstein, then, as now, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted: “Waxman elevates to high art the blend of substantive policy knowledge, advocacy of policy improvements and excellence in strategic execution.”
Then came Newt Gingrich. The kind of progressive legislating at which Waxman excelled was no longer possible. In time, he remade himself as Capitol Hill’s top cop…
I should say my one experience with him was a little frustrating, trying to get him to back the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. (Well, I was there at his office anyway with a PDA group, I didn’t get to talk myself.)
He was all, “Well, first we have to spend time investigating these charges…” and we were all, “Dude, impeachment IS investigation, and the evidence of wrongdoing is overwhelming, and we’re running out of time, and the next lawless administration will go even farther…” but to no avail.