Fortney’s Complaint

Originally Posted at The Festering Swamp on October 19, 2007

Here is yet another example of the tolerance and open-mindedness to be found within the ranks of the Democratic Party. How a political party with such people in it can have a Congressional majority or even maintain political viability is a mystery. – Mike LaRoche

Lately there's been much controversy over a Democratic-backed increase in spending on the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), with the usual suspects deriding Bush and other Republicans opposing this massive, unnecessary middle-class entitlement expansion as heartless child-killers, Scrooges, and so on.

Yesterday the debate reached a new low when California Rep. Fortney Hillman "Pete" Stark, Jr. (D-Cal.), on the floor of the House of Representatives, President Bush's veto of the aforementioned boondoggle in a rambling, slurred, seemingly drunken manner:

"Republicans sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war on children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if he can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement."

Sickening of course, but all too typical of a dull-witted loudmouth like Stark. He's done this many times before, for example:

• At a Congressional hearing in 1990, Stark called then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Wade Sullivan (who is black) a "disgrace to his race."
  

• He once called former Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.) a "whore for the insurance industry" who compiled her knowledge of health care via "pillow-talk" with her husband.
  

• In 1999, Stark criticized then-California state welfare director Eloise Anderson as someone who "would kill children if she had her way."
  

• In 2003, Stark challenged then-Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colo.) to a fight at a House Ways & Means Committee meeting, saying McInnis was a "little wimp" and a "little fruitcake."
  

My initial inclination was to dismiss Little Lord Fortney as just an insecure, ill-tempered, intellectual dwarf, but his style of "debating" has become all too common on the left these days, given the present dearth of ideas on that side of the political aisle. Thus, I am not at all surprised that such behavior would occur on the floor of the House, or fail to be stricken from the Congressional Record by "the most ethical Congress in history."