Sunday, November 24, 2013

Issa's sleighbells ringing in red states



With the holiday season and all upon us, Rep. Darrell Issa has taken off to Deck the Halls in several red states with hearings reveling in heavily spiked Obamanog. As the chairman of House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee, he has loaded up the sleigh for grandstand appearances in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Arizona.
Carefully selected for his road show, the audiences will doubtless be quite friendly as he rips President Obama and the Affordable Care Act without calling a single witness from the other side. With Issa’s tactics, matters must be settle by acclimation.
The hearings will be a Christmas present to himself. Issa, the richest fellow in Congress (ca. $400 million) still can’t get enough of tilted hearings where only his side can testify. You may recall that he staged an all-male witness panel when he took up the subject of contraception coverage required of insurers.
When Issa, a southern Californian from a red-hot conservative district, succeeded Henry Waxman as the committee chair, he demanded of his 7 subcommittees: “I want seven hearings a week – times 40. ” He then staged 280 hearings in one year; Waxman, 208 in two years. You must also remember that in his hatred of the president, Issa also told Rush Limbaugh that Obama was “One of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.”
Issa always impresses me as a guy who swallowed a horsefly in his soup before realizing it and never really got over the nausea.
He is a right-wing committee chairman with a darkly piercing glare and a ruthless agenda on how government should be exposed by his ongoing performance art… If only in the red states.

1 comment:

Marv Katz said...

And some of us have to deal with the embarrassment that he's a Kent State grad...albeit of the Stark campus.