Marlin Stutzman's Endless Victimhood - The Lonely War of Marlin Stutzman

OCT 3, 2013
The Lonely War Of Marlin Stutzman
By Charles P. Pierce at 8:45am

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The Intertoobz is alive this morning with the plaintive wail of Congressman Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, who finds that he is being disrespected by history even as he is in the process of making it.

"We aren't going to be disrespected...We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is."

Have a cookie, Marlin. Have a cookie and go play with your toes.

A largely unremarked element of the etiology of the prion disease currently afflicting the Republican party -- and therefore, alas, the country -- is the carefully cultivated, and by now deeply inculcated, sense of conservative victimhood that has been a prime element of conservatism's emotional appeal since long before Richard Nixon rose to power on it. They are always beset. They are always besieged. They are always surrounded -- by intellectuals, by scientists, by the all-powerful Left that exists primarily in their imaginations, because it certainly doesn't exist in American politics, and hasn't since the days of Joe McCarthy.

Culturally, this always has been expressed partly by the endless conservative bleating that somebody, somewhere is getting laid. The Gospels tell us that the gates of hell will not prevail against Christ's church. The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank's marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the conservative Id.

In my lifetime alone, I've seen Nixon play this like a violin, Goldwater delegates proudly chanting their sagebrush songs of rebellion, Agnew intimidate the media with their own intellectual achievement, as though an advanced degree was smuggling drugs, and now this bunch, the natural heirs to decades of conservatives who have fought the dragons in their own minds, and who, like Marlin Stutzman, seem mystified that they have not yet been awarded the Order Of The Legion Of Courage. Vainglorious louts, driving the nails into their own palms.

They are children playing dress up. Everybody's Aragorn for Halloween. Meanwhile, the government is shut down, the country a laughing stock, and real people with real problems to overcome go hungry, or get sick, or find their lives flaking away at the edges while Marlin Stutzman rings the doorbell, says trick-or-treat in Elvish, and then walks away, bitching about the quality of the M&Ms.

http://jimhightower.com/node/8147#.Uk7iAMaIIQ1

Tilling our public treasury
Thursday, October 3, 2013 | Posted by Jim Hightower

Some aspects of American agriculture are quite odd. For example, to meet a farmer these days, there's no need for you to venture out to the hinterland – because thousands of them actually are city slickers.

And they’re really slick, for many of them neither plant nor harvest wheat, cotton, peanuts, or any crops at all. Rather, relaxing in their often-luxurious urban nests, they farm the federal farm bill, harvesting millions of dollars each year from taxpayers. A new report from the Environmental Working Group reveals that more than 18,000 people living in America's 54 largest cities pocketed about $24 million last year from the ag department's direct payment program.

New York City, for example, has 152 of these "farmers," San Francisco has 116, Chicago 393, Denver 821, Tampa 100, Tucson 328, and Houston 1,405. That's because the program makes payments not only to real farmers, but also to people who merely hold an ownership interest in farmland, whether or not any crops are raised on it and even if the city-dwelling recipient has never visited the place.

Ironically, this cockamamie payment scheme was put into the 1996 farm bill as a transition measure to wean farmers off subsidies. But it's been renewed twice, and it looks like our gridlocked Congress is about to do it again, even though it pays zero to the majority of America's farm families. Indeed, the bulk of the $5 billion paid out annually goes to the biggest spreads, including multimillion-dollar corporate operations.

Even if congress critters finally muster the political gumption to stop this absurdity, they intend to replace it with a more-bizarre crop-insurance scam that's a guaranteed income program for multimillionaires, allowing them to keep tilling our public treasury. For more information go to www.ewg.org.