Oh, Sheila!
July 19, 2011 by Ben Crystal
Few people could suggest with a straight face that the U.S. House of Representatives includes the best and brightest among us. In fact, most of the denizens of the august climes of the Personal Liberty Digest™ are already well aware that the members of the U.S. House of Representatives struggle to represent anyone but themselves. That said, even among a group nearly as exclusive as the membership at Augusta National Golf Club, there’s always going to be one or two who manage to allow remarks to escape their flapping blowholes that are so breathtakingly stupid they make the usual jacklegs, grifters and string-pullers who stink up the Capitol look like Cincinattus by comparison.
Enter the lovely and talented Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). The Hon. Ms. Jackson Lee has already locked up the title of “Most God-awful Boss in Congress.” Since she first took her seat in 1995, her staff has sported a higher turnover rate than the Crips. One staffer quit after Jackson-Lee threw a phone at him. And Ms. Jackson Lee evidently cut geography class (among others) at liberal demagoguery school: “Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing, but they are living in peace. I would look for a better human rights record for North Vietnam, but they are living side by side.” For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that some of her defenders claim she meant to say “two Koreas,” in which case, she’s… still wrong.
Last week, Jackson Lee was back at it, raging from the people’s pulpit about her favorite topic: racism. Granted, ever since the beginning of the Presidential campaign of a little-known junior Senator from Illinois, liberals have endeavored to use the specious charge of racism to explain everything from President Obama’s lack of executive experience to his comprehensive incompetence as Commander in Chief. Normally, any criticism is immediately dismissed by the owners of the liberal movement as racist in nature. But “normal” and “things done, said or even imagined by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee” rarely collide in the same universe, much less the same sentence. This is a woman who once accused The Hill of racism for printing an article noting she had asked NASA staffers if the Mars rover would visit the flag planted by Apollo astronauts… on the moon.
And in her logic-impaired tirade late last week, Representative Jackson Lee suggested that opposition to Obama’s economic “plan” is a result of… well… let’s let Sheila speak for herself (as if she requires any prompting): “I do not understand what I think is the maligning and maliciousness (toward) this president…Why is he different? And in my community, that is the question that we raise. In the minority community that is question that is being raised. Why is this president being treated so disrespectfully? I am particularly sensitive to the fact that only this president — only this one, only this one — has received the kind of attacks and disagreement and inability to work, only this one.” Of course, she and her fellow Democrats treated President George W. Bush with the utmost in collegial regard. To be fair, Bush deserved some of the barbs he faced, given his profligate spending, harebrained schemes like No Child Left Behind, and his tendency to do things to the English language for which you pay extra in Vegas.
I often wonder if liberals, including Jackson Lee, consider the fact that by laying the exhausted race card on the table every time Obama slows for a political roadblock, they are essentially saying that Obama is nothing more than some helpless racial avatar, incapable of accomplishment — or, in Obama’s case — failure as anything other than a black man. Therefore, playing the race card in order to defend his every misstep is either an admission that he needs to be rescued with prosaic hokum, a revelation that liberals — bereft of meritorious ideas — have no other cards to play, or that they’re just plain silly.
Of course, Jackson Lee in particular resides in the latter category. Her amateur astronomical observations hardly represent her only ventures beyond her limited intellectual capacity. I would be willing to venture a guess that she’s not even aware that she’s calling Obama’s critics racist for agreeing with him: “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.” (Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill., March 20, 2006)
Of course, the whole thing could just be Marvin the Martian’s evil plot. Perhaps NASA can clue her in to the fact that the Illudium Q-36 is an equal opportunity Explosive Space Modulator.
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