McCain: Unacceptable Pork Gets My Vote

Hey John, people remember. You may have dementia, but this thing with tubes and the Google, for which you have no understanding, it's killing you. This was you on Sept 23:

a bill with “any kind of earmarks” would be “unacceptable” and “simply cannot happen.”

Those are bold words, can you remember to live up to them? Or do you just talk a good game, but in the end just vote to save your political career? Cut to yesterday, despite the fact that the bill was loaded with special earmarked tax breaks, you voted for it. Then you told your brother-from-another-mother Bush he should veto it because of the “insanity and obscenity” of the pork. So what it is? Another senior moment for you?

Check the cassette drive on your Commodore 64 and print this out on your dot-matrix printer, your campaign is lost.



Source: ThinkProgess

As Ezra Klein points out:

Like a lot of McCain's posturing, his war on pork makes for good headlines and bad governance. If he were anywhere near as dogmatic on earmarks as he claims to be, it's impossible to imagine him passing any major legislation. Ever. Or voting for any major legislation. or approving budget bills and spending. Or having a working relationship with Congress. Or getting reelected, as every district in the country finds crucial programs and infrastructure subsidies are being cut.

Meanwhile, whenever the topic turns to earmarks, I always suggest that folks go play around the the Sunlight Foundation's interactive earmarks map. Earmarks are rarely obviously wasteful. Rather, they're small appropriations that exist beneath the urgency level that would merit federal consideration. So districts and states elect individual representatives and one of their side jobs is to push through local priorities. Those priorities may be odd, but relatively few are obviously wasteful. Type in my hometown of Irvine, and the nearest earmark is in Long Beach: $450,000 to outfit the children's hospital. Near to that is Mission Viejo, with $400,000 for the Neonatal and Pediatric Intensive Care Unity. And a tick over from that is Huntington Beach, which got $50,000 for an afterschool arts education program for low income youth. It's easy to talk about cutting studies on bear DNA. It's a bit harder to explain why you want to cut children's hospitals and afterschool programs. And it's nearly impossible to then say how you're going to pass bills after you do.