Kentucky Is Doomed

Rand Paul and Chris Christie are engaged in a public verbal smackdown. Time to pass the popcorn.

The Associated Press reports:

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul hit back at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in the two Republicans’ ongoing spat over national security.

Christie last week criticized Paul’s opposition to warrantless federal surveillance programs, saying it harmed efforts to prevent terrorism. Paul told reporters after speaking at a fundraiser outside Nashville on Sunday that Christie’s position hurts GOP chances in national elections, and that spending priorities of critics like the governor and Rep. Peter King of New York do more to harm national security.

“They’re precisely the same people who are unwilling to cut the spending, and their ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme — give me all my Sandy money now.’” Paul said, referring to federal funding after the hurricane last year. “Those are the people who are bankrupting the government and not letting enough money be left over for national defense.”

Needless to say, I disagree with both of them. But there seems to be a pattern of right-wing lawmakers and governors bad-mouthing Sandy relief and then accepting federal money for their own natural disasters. Rick Perry and Oklahoma senators Coburn and Inhofe come to mind, and I’m sure we could find more — so if I lived in Kentucky I’d be sure my insurance policies were paid up.

Kentucky is bordered by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, both of which have flooded massively in the past, and western Kentucky is in a major seismic zone, so killer earthquakes are not out of the question. Plus they do get some good-size tornadoes in Kentucky sometimes. Be afraid, Kentucky.

10 thoughts on “Kentucky Is Doomed

  1. In Red States, they should call it, ‘Douche-canoe Insurance” – ’cause the next time the Mighty Mississippi floods, you’ll need canoes, but maybe this time, we in the Blue States won’t fund aid, because you elect giant douches into Congress, who don’t want to help us in our rare times of need.

    If you keep electing giant douche-canoes like Senators Paul, Coburn, Inhofe, Rubio, and Cruz, and House members like Steven King, Gohmert, and Bachmann, among others, you can’t keep counting on the good will of the rest of Americans in Blue States every time there’s a killer tornado, hurricane, or some fertilizer plant goes KABLOOOEEEEY! because it hasn’t been inspected in its entire existence, if we can’t count on a little help from your Red State douche-canoes if we have more than a once-in-a-lifetime hurricane hit the Northeast.

    And memo to Senator Paul:
    After decades of your Nihilistic Republican vandals having sway in this once-great nation, WE HAVE A LOT LESS WORTH DEFENDING!!!

    I have a new term I’m going to roll out – “Turd World Nation.”
    We’re turning into a “Turd World Nation” because thanks to the likes of sociopathic politicians like you, Senator Paul, less and less of this country is worth a f*cking sh*t.

  2. The Republican primaries in 2016 should be interesting, because they’ll actually be about something other than who hates Barack Obama the most. If Rand Paul and Chris Christie both run they’ll be fighting over national security, and if Rand Paul and Marco Rubio both run they’ll be fighting over immigration.

    Well, the Republicans may have reached the point where they’ll nominate a man for president whose response to victims of a natural disaster is “Gimme, gimme, gimme,” but nobody else is going to vote for such a colossal dick.

  3. What is it with Sandy relief that bothers them so much? I still just don’t get it. Is it that it was going to the hated “Noo York Citeh!” and Jersey? Is it that Sandy is pretty much the proof that climate change is going to f’ us in a bad, bad way? Or is is just that it was the first big bundle of money the gubmint was asked for after the Nutjob Caucus had taken control in the House?

    I mean, they convinced themselves it was loaded with irrelevant pork, but once you looked, it turned out the pork wasn’t pork or irrelevant, it was that Sandy was a mega-storm that took out stuff all up and down the coast. It’s one of those things they choose to fixate on that I just can’t comprehend.

    But anyway, I’m happy to see Christie and Rand Paul locked in a good old-style Japanese monster battle. I’m sad that some recent medical treatment means I can’t be chowing down on popcorn while I watch, but with luck it’ll last a while and just keep getting better. Let’s see, so far we have Christie essentially saying Paul is soft on terrorists, and Paul is saying Christie is not only a facist but a greedy spend-happy one. AWESOME. Who will be the first to accuse the other of being a Democrat?

  4. @biggerbox:

    Yes, Yes, and Christie saying non-hostile things about Obama during an election riled them.

  5. In rightie world, we can pay for disaster relief, or for national security (which we have to throw absolutely gobs of money at, because throwing money at a problem doesn’t work for libby ideas, but it does for conservative ideas), but we can’t pay for both of those. Because, uh, freedom. You know what I’m tired of paying for? Florida hurricanes, Mississippi flooding and OKC tornadoes. How often have we rebuilt those places? NYC and Jersey are almost never, ever hit. So I’m ok with that even tho here in Cheeseland we hardly ever have need for disaster relief and FEMA.

  6. Next Generation Science Standards in Kentucky Draw Hostility from Religious Groups.

    …Matt Singleton, a Baptist minister, is one of the opponents who spoke to the board about why the standards should not be adopted, according to The Courier-Journal. “Outsiders are telling public school families that we must follow the rich man’s elitist religion of evolution, that we no longer have what the Kentucky Constitution says is the right to worship almighty God,” Singleton said. “Instead, this fascist method teaches that our children are the property of the state.”

    Another opponent, Dena Stewart-Gore, suggested that the standards will make religious students feel ostracized. “The way socialism works is it takes anybody that doesn’t fit the mold and discards them,” she said, per the The Courier-Journal. “We are even talking genocide and murder here, folks.”

  7. “We must follow the rich man’s elitist religion of evolution, that we no longer have what the Kentucky Constitution says is the right to worship almighty God,”

    They’re forcibly shuttering all the Baptist churches in Kentucky and converting them to Houses of Evolution Worship? What a great idea.

    “The way socialism works is it takes anybody that doesn’t fit the mold and discards them,”

    It’s a good thing the Deep South rejects such conformity, with their well-known culture of diversity, tolerance and cosmopolitanism, not to mention respect for knowledge; atheists and adherents of non-Christian religions feel right at home in rural Kentucky towns.

  8. “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation”

    Really?…. I sense an under current of scripture in his saying. Well, we’ll see how it plays out.. It kinda reminds me of an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies where Granny breaks up a television wrestling match between sweet little Rebecca of Donnybrook farm and the Manassas Mauler.
    Tender young Rand is being set upon by the big mean Christie.. David and Goliath?

  9. North Carolina has become a national laughingstock for having elected a governor and legislature that are certainly Randian, and would be improved if they were even Christie-an (trying to avoid religious confusion there). The message of the campaigns is so negative and so general that facts and examples don’t work, and they just shift to any random choice from among their dozens of stock phrases when they are challenged on a specific point. The fact that the entire population of a state cannot be abandoned as an example enables them to continue accepting aid while decrying the taxes that fund it. This is so obvious, but it gets no traction.

  10. The problem that red state republicans with Sandy relief is that NY/NJ is loaded with liberals, Southern/Eastern Europeans and Irish. In other words, people that think they are white, but really aren’t.

    There is a tremendous amount of white on white racism in Red State America.

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