Republican Cautionary Tales: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Ex-Congressman Bob Ney (R., Ohio) has a new book out in which he calls House Speaker John Beohner “a bit lazy” and “a man who was all about winning and money. He was a chain-smoking, relentless wine drinker who was more interested in the high life–golf, women, cigarettes, fun, and alcohol.” Keep in mind that Ney pled to felonies out of the Abramoff scandal, so you have to consider the source. Still, his description of the deal he claims to have cut with Boehner sounds absolutely true to type.

Then there’s Washington State Rep. Ed Orcutt (R), the ranking Republican member of the state House Transportation Committee, who thinks that bicyclists produce more carbon dioxide than automobiles do. Er… No. The European Cyclists Federation puts CO2 emissions from biking at about 10 times less than driving a car (PDF), even after accounting for the emissions required to make the bike and emissions linked to grow, package and ship the food the rider eats to power the bicycle. Plainly, Rep. Orcutt wasn’t selected for his ability to think logically.

A week after the State of South Carolina argued in the U.S. Supreme Court that any need  for the Voting Rights Act had long since passed in the modern South, a black, openly gay mayoral candidate in Clarksdale, Mississippi was murdered, beaten, dragged and burned and possibly dragged behind an automobile to a horrible, excruciating death. There has been an arrest, and the suspect is black, but still. Modest props to U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson (R., Mississippi) for asking the FBI to get involved.

At the 2011 Women’s World Cup, North Korea’s soccer team claimed that positive doping tests resulted from musk deer gland therapy used to treat players who had been struck by lightning. The explanation was not as convincing as it was inventive, and North Korea was banned from the next World Cup. But it’s slightly more credible than your average Republican politician.

About these ads