May 16, 2021: Tumors of Greed

 

5/16/21: If you’re into comedy, Rep. Matt Gaetz is the gift that keeps on giving. During a speech in Ohio, the Republican lawmaker from Florida, tells an audience he’s a little lamb of innocence if you think about it.

 

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Tumors of greed.

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Sure, federal prosecutors are after him, as Gaetz puts it, for “exchanging money for naughty favors.” But he didn’t do it. 

Plus, if he did, that would be no worse than other members of Congress bringing back the practice of including earmarks in various bills, “and everybody knows that’s the corruption.”

Earmarks, if you’ve forgotten, allow a legislator to add a request to some bill that is about to pass, asking for money to be earmarked, or set aside, for example, to repair the Brent Spence Bridge, over the Ohio River. Or a Florida lawmaker, like Gaetz, might request federal funding to help clean up the red tides that have blanketed that state’s beaches so often in recent years. 

Those are earmarks.

Brent Spence Bridge over Ohio River, looking north to Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

Gaetz has allegedly paid for sex with a minor and may have been part of a sex-trafficking operation run by a friend. (That friend, Joel Greenberg, just so happened to have pled guilty to six charges the day before; so you could understand why Rep. Gaetz might have been on edge a little.) 

Several Republican candidates for various offices had been scheduled to attend the same meeting as Gaetz. They backed out after they realized he was coming.

 

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THIS SIMPLE BLOGGER happens to consider communism a hideous historical failure. That doesn’t mean you can’t reveal the warts of capitalism, which are many, and the tumors of greed. 

Frankly, if you can make money doing it or making it or selling it, including sex-trafficking minors, people will do it, make it, or sell it. When Gary Kidd heard the federal government was paying people $1,000 per head to adopt wild mustangs and give them good homes, he sniffed out profits, and a lot of horse manure. He, his wife, and several other relations adopted a number of animals, and when asked by a reporter via a phone call, Mr. Kidd reported that the horses were doing well and nibbling the grass in his pasture, as he and the reporter spoke. 

Actually, by that time, Kidd had sold all the animals he had for $20,000, “and the mustangs ended up at a dusty Texas livestock auction frequented by slaughterhouse brokers known as kill buyers.” 

When the reporter mentioned this fact, Mr. Kidd remembered he had a few imaginary horses to groom and hung up.