Question: How can such a nice guy be so wrong?
Answer: He has to really work at it.
The nice guy is Speaker Charles McCall, just selected for his record setting fourth term as Speaker of the House. In a March 2022 interview, The Speaker says his success has been based on two factors: 1. He has kept the House “civil and dignified.” 2. And by the House, meaning exclusively the members of his Republican caucus, it has accomplished “great things for the Oklahoma citizens.”
Well, he is half right. In watching the demeanor of lawmakers, they generally are civil toward each other; usually don’t pick their noses on camera; address each other through the Speaker’s chair and call each other such endearing terms of “Leader” or “Representative” or “Chairman.”
How nice. How congenial. How contrived, because the second part of McCall’s claim to fame couldn’t be more wrong – that is, his caucus has accomplished great things for the citizens they represent.
So here are a few, most ballyhooed, nationally noticed great things already signed into law this session:
- The bathroom bill, a search for a non-existent problem.
- Several more unconstitutional, anti-abortion laws.
- More proposals that prove most lawmakers don’t know the difference between chromosomes and Cheerios.
- Tax cuts such as the complete abolition of corporate income taxes making us more dependent than ever on energy taxes, thus making our economy more vulnerable to wild swings up and down.
- At least two corporate sugar daddy giveaways to out-of-state and even out-of-country corporations totally nearly $1 billion of your tax money in the hope of bribing them to send jobs to Oklahoma. Don’t hold your breath on these two because of the other, discriminatory, mean-spirited and mostly illegal ideas tossed around this entire session by dimwits who mainly just want to get re-elected. Fifty-five of them already have been because they did not draw any opponent[s].
McCall partly survives in his tough job by simply letting any and all nonsensical and stupid ideas tossed out by his rural-dominated caucus get to the floor where other, wiser, urban and suburban members won’t vote against them because they, too, are probably holding the best paid job they’ve ever had and don’t want to lose it by showing any evidence of a political backbone.
So, this is what passes for a Legislature in a bright red, prejudice-dominated, ignorance-imbued, racially-charged and anti-woman state, so why would we expect anything better from the people The People elect?
Obviously, we can’t make silk out of these sow’s ears. Hell, we can’t even make sense out of them, which explains why slick, rich and smooth rural banker McCall has survived in the corner office of the Capitol’s fourth floor so long.
Compromise is a requirement to create good laws but compromising always to the lowest common denominator leads to what we have now, which is a red state, led by people that only give the rest of us red faces and display only their red asses to the rest of America and the world.
Clueless Kevin and his endless search for a Top 10 ranking? Well, thanks to his own efforts and nobody else’s, I think by fall he’ll accomplish at least one – and that will be the number of investigations underway digging into wrongdoing in his “most transparent” administration in state history.
And not to mention corrupt.
