Does the GOP Hate Farmers?

Again, Cafferty: 

JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: Wolf, the question this hour is, are earmarks a necessary evil or are they just plain evil?

S. in Michigan: "It depends on what ends up being called an earmark and who labels it as such. For the state or city getting the money, it is progress money or an investment. For others, it becomes pork, or an earmark, et cetera. For example, for Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, monitoring volcanoes is an earmark, but, for Alaskans, monitoring hurricanes may be earmarks. So, should we stop doing both?"

See, the people out there get it a lot better than the wingnuts and their media stooges think they do. John McCain, who like me has  apparently recently discovered Twitter, is Twittering like a madman with what he apparently thinks people will regard as "wasteful" items in the budget, such as: 

$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi 

And 

How do you manage a beaver? 

(I'd take a swing at that last straight line, but Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox beat me to it). 

Apparently, Senator Straight Talk doesn't realize that the buck-toothed little bastards did a million bucks worth of damage to NC farms, timberland, and roads last year. Guess when you have eight houses, the problems of small farmers out in the sticks don't mean that much to you. 

In fact, a lot of the projects the born again budget hawks seem to be really exercised about are farm related. Over at Faux News, Hannity rails against  things like honeybee research and catfish genetics and "thanks to Tom Harkin, almost $2 million for swine odor and manure management. Because those pigs and their manure, they do smell pretty bad. We need to do something about that." 

Yeah, Sean, we kinda do, and if you'd ever get out of your comfy chair and get your smug, bloated  ass down to Eastern North Carolina or rural Iowa, you'd know why. You live in Duplin County, there ain't a damn thing funny about pig shit. 

 And as for honey bees,  as another Cafferty commenter pointed out: 

 $1.7 million for honeybee research. This seems silly at first glance. But when you recall that there appears to be something wiping out the honeybee population, and that these bees are necessary for crops, like apples, peaches, soybeans, pears, pumpkins, cucumbers, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries, then it quickly starts looking like maybe we ought to be spending more money on this research.

It's true that Obama spoke the other night about cutting some farm subsidies. But as the Chicago Tribune points out: Obama's budget plan would eliminate direct payments for producers with high sales revenues. The subsidies are paid to farmers regardless of crop prices or crop yield.

On the other hand, invest any money on research aimed at  actually increasing yield or dealing with threats to actual crops, and it's "eamark! earmark! earmark!" 

Which raises the question: what does the GOP  have against farmers? 

It's kind of odd, given the farmer fetish the right wingers and their media stooges seem to have. After all, whenever they want to get the opinion of "real Americans" they always seem to find a farmer to interview. But I guess farmers are like the troops: the Right  loves them in the abstract, but for God's sake let's not spend any money on them. 

Republicans: Those Elitist Socialist Country-Destroying Commie Terrorist Lovers Aren't Being Bipartisan Enough.

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Poor Eric Cantor. Poor Honorable John McCain. Poor Lindsey Graham. It seems those awful Democrats aren't being nice enough to them.

Cantor, the House minority whip, recently released a statement expressing his disappointment that those big old meanies in the Democratic Congress weren't playing nice.

"President Obama promised to put an end to the petty politics that have come to dominate Washington," Cantor sniveled. "Yet today, that message is threatened as the White House and their allies are making political threats rather than crafting a bipartisan economic stimulus plan." (You'd think a guy with a cool title like "Whip" wouldn't be so petulant.)

Honorable John was even more dismayed: "It was a bad beginning because it wasn't what we promised the American people, what President Obama promised the American people, that we would sit down together." Graham, who's on the Senate Banking Committee, whined to ABC News that those bad old Democrats "rammed [the stimulus bill] through the House" after starting out "with the idea, 'We won, we write the bill.'"

I suppose I can understand their pique. After all, during hearings over the stimulus plan, a Democratic committee chairman actually closed down debate by shutting off Republicans' microphones, walking off the podium, and turning the lights off in the hearing room.

Then there was the hearing where the Democratic chairman actually called the Capitol police to have the Republicans removed from the hearing room. And who can forget the snide and condescending statement by the Democratic Rules Committee chairman that the "Republicans are just crying because they're losing on policy debates about job creation"?

Oh, wait. Did I say all those things were done by Democrats? Silly me. Those were actually stunts pulled by the Republican leadership back in the days when the Republicans were in the majority. How soon they forget. Or maybe they think we're so dumb that we'll forget.

Actually, the more you look at it, "hope the American people are so dumb they'll forget the last eight years" seems to be exactly the current Republican strategy. How else can you explain the Republican "plan" to resurrect the economy, which is basically nothing but tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts?

They're apparently hoping and praying that nobody will ask the question, "If tax cuts alone will save the economy, how'd we get into this mess after eight years of Bush tax cuts?" Or maybe they think we're so dumb we'll blame two years of a Democratic-controlled Congress and ignore the fact that that Congress didn't repeal those tax cuts that were supposed to be so great for the economy.

It would also explain the Republican glorification of ignorance and amateurism, which finds its most common expression in bitter denunciations of anyone who shows any sign of being informed or intelligent as an "elitist" and a rhetorical style that consists mainly of variations on "you think you're pretty smart, don't you?"

Rep. Cantor still insists that the Republicans are "committed to working with President Obama to find real economic solutions." Oh, really? You mean the way the Republicans demanded concessions in the stimulus bill, the Democrats agreed to them, and every single one of the Republicans in the House voted against the bill anyway?

You mean the way President Obama came to Capitol Hill to confer with Republicans on the bill, and Minority leader John Boehner announced before he'd even gotten there that he'd instructed the Republican caucus to vote against it?

You mean the way Republican Sen. Judd Gregg claimed he'd be interested in the job of commerce secretary, got a commitment that the Democratic governor of New Hampshire would appoint only a Republican in his place, then withdrew his nomination like a jerky high school kid yanking away an offered handshake and yelling "PSYCH!" That's your idea of "commitment to working with President Obama"? This is like saying Lucy is committed to working with Charlie Brown to kick the football.

Despite it all, President Obama has said he intends to keep working on the whole bipartisanship thing. "The president is always going to reach out to people of both parties," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the Washington Post. "That's what he's always wanted. He wants a lot of ideas."

So it looks like this will be Obama's pattern for a while: Reach out a hand, get it slapped aside, get his agenda passed anyway, then have the Republicans whine and cry about being left out. Personally, I think it makes Obama look like he's being played for a chump. But then, I'm willing to admit the possibility that a black guy with an Arab-sounding name who managed to confound the conventional wisdom, beat the presumptive nominee of his party and go on to get elected president may just be smarter than me.

And unlike the Republicans, I don't see that as a downside.