BY RICHARD L. FRICKER
Once again Oklahoma Congressman Dan Boren [DINO-Muskogee] mounted his high heels, pulled up his hot pants, caressed an 8-by-10 color glossy of Sen. Tom Coburn and headed down the halls of Congress doing the pachyderm strut. This time the Okie from Muskogee DINO boy is trying to preserve the Bush era tax breaks for the rich.
You gotta love this guy. He is to the poor what Coburn [also from Muskogee] is to the sick and infirm; uncaring, agenda driven and most of all – me and mine first. Boren, not known as a deep thinker or source of original thought, is more in the camp follower division of the great conservative army.
As an ever willing lackey of the conservative cause Boren has told onlookers he will join the Republican filibuster to stop his fellow Democrats for putting an end to the Bush tax breaks for the rich. Boren keeps his job by keeping Coburn supplied with, well, political amusement.
What Boren might have done before he shot off his mouth was to take a look at Timothy Noah’s 10-part series on SLATE. Noah notes that since the beginning of the Bush recession the rich have increased their wealth by 8%. The middle class, Noah says, has declined in wealth by 2.8%. Thus the gap widens, Boren either didn’t notice, or like fellow Muskogean Coburn, didn’t care. http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/entry/2266026
On the subject of the poor, downtrodden rich Forbes Magazine came out with their list of rich guys about the same time DINO was professing everlasting love to the tax breaks. Seems, in addition to the usual players such as Bill Gates who appears to have a social awareness lacking in the conservative tea bag folk, tea bag money men Charles and David Koch weight in at $21.5 billion EACH. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/23/richest-americans_n_736182.html
It’s easy to see why Boren and the other DINOs pandering to tea bag and conservative causes would be worried these fellows would wind up on a foreclosure list or have to go to a public emergency room for routine medical care. Poor babies must be worried that taxes will leave them abandoned under a bridge. Fortunately Boren, the Republicans and teabag people are looking out for their interest.
Boren could have learned more about the Koch bros by stopping to read the recent piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker. Why people are pandering to these two?http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
Why the tea bag and conservative Republicans are concerned about the financial well being of people so rich they need not even carry money on their person boggles the imagination. Perhaps the thought process is, better be homeless and without a job, or hope of any social mobility than to be called “liberal.”
Boren and Coburn have kept the voters of Oklahoma and Muskogee in particular in the dark, scared – not sure of what, but scared, and in their pocket for several elections. There seems to be no wind of change blowing from Muskogee.
– Richard L. Fricker lives in Tulsa, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer, providing both essay and video commentary [see Observer home page]. His latest book, Martian Llama Racing Explained, is available at http://www.richardfricker.com.
As bad as Boren is, he’s just one sliver of the rotten wood that makes up the Democratic Party. It’s as if the Democrats never changed one bit from the time when another Favorite Son of Oklahoma declared that “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
We might as well get prepared for the moment when the US ceases to exist as a sovereign nation as it becomes divided among the corporations which really own it – and us.