October 24, 2007

Pete Stark

Perhaps Congressman Pete "Fortney" Stark was a bit overtaken with outrage at the endless White House lies as the GOP loyally backed Bush's assault on the health of children in his veto of the SCHIP program. But who could blame him, after years of slanderous, slime-filled assaults on anyone who gets in their way?

So Stark finally told it like it is on the House floor. In the incomprehensible double standard of modern day politics, Republicans can lie with abandon in Congressional remarks, on the stump and in the media, but Democrats are bullied into apologizing for telling the truth. So, Nancy Pelosi, increasingly a "leader" who prefers to be recognized as being "civilized" and "polite" rather than fighting for her party's positions, rebuked Stark instead of expressing revulsion at the hundreds of billions of our dollars for Bush's War and his high dudgeon over more money for medical care that our children need.

The Republicans, wallowing in the gutter of attack politics, stand by their own. Pelosi put a knife in Pete Stark's back for daring to utter words that get to the heart of the GOP duplicity.

Stark is no shrinking violet. We interviewed him once shortly after he almost got into fisticuffs with a Republican half his age after a GOP committee -- during the Hastert reign -- wouldn't allow Democrats to participate in the drafting of a bill.

All one has to do is to look at the Bush video from 2004 when he continually mocks his own lies about trying to find WMDs to provide evidence that the Iraq War dead -- ours and theirs -- is not so sacred that Bush won’t use it for a few laughs.

Stark pierced through the fictional Bushevik propaganda narrative that runs a parallel with the suppressed grim reality of the "war on terror" and the neglect of our domestic needs. It was unwelcome to Nancy Pelosi for Stark to reveal the truth. It put a wrinkle in her haute couture of establishment politics of "good manners."

When will Pelosi and Reid start shouting to the highest heavens that it is Bush and Cheney who have betrayed our troops by putting them needlessly in harm's way and then conducting a political war that has led to needless death and injury on a horrific scale -- and managing it in as incompetent a manner as any conflict in our history?

If we go any further down this road the tears will be those of conservatives as well as progressives. They will be American tears.

Congressman Stark, you deserve the Wings of Justice Award for saying what we all would want to say on the floor of the House of Representatives: it is called the truth.

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