Love Those Looneytarians!
I know a lot of people who like the Libertarian Party because they are anti-war and pro-pot.
Well, I think they’ve been leaning too heavily on the pro-pot part because that wacky-weed has made them doodle in the noodle.
First there was the guy who thought requiring food industry workers to wash their hands after tinkling was way too restrictive to business growth. Now we’ve got this guy —
Fox Business host John Stossel on Sunday asserted that most government was unnecessary because companies like Walmart would spontaneously provide assistance to disaster victims “in many more ways” than the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could.
So after Katrina, Wal Mart would have housed the 250,000 evacuees who were brought to Houston? Well, I wish they’d have held up their hands to let us know about that at the time. And that Hobby Lobby would have been delighted to handle the disposal of hazardous waste material after Hurricane Ike. And that Chick-fil-A will repair levees, handle low interest disaster loans to small businesses, and reconnect downed electricity distributions lines.
Waiting on Walmart.
I love how Libertarians always point to FEMA as not working because FEMA did not work under George W Bush. It works pretty darn well before Bush and after Bush. Honey, just because something didn’t work well under Bush, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work well. Nothing worked well under Bush.
Thanks to everybody for the heads up.
FEMA wasn’t supposed to work under dumbass dubya. That was the whole point. Wingnuts wanted to get rid of it because it worked so well for Clinton.
1Right, and businesses would automatically protect the lives of workers, like they used to before OSHA; protect rights of consumers before the Consumer Protection Bureau; of course they would negotiate living wages without unions and voluntarily clean up their oil and chemical damages. Except they didn’t and they wouldn’t without the force of law to compel them. One need only look back to the Recession to see how an unregulated financial system wrecked our economy. How soon they forget!
2Walmart depends on government welfare programs to assist their own employees rather than paying them a living wage. The only people Walmart would be assisting is their own senior executives and the billionaire Waltons.
3WalMart’s track record says it all. They won’t even help their own employees out of poverty. Why would they suddenly want to help strangers?
4glf said it exactly right!! And, he said what I was going to say, except he said it so much better!!
And, I love JJ’s parting shot: “Nothing worked well under Bush.” Boy, ain’t that the truth!!
5And then there are companies like Exxon and BP who created their own disasters and can’t even be bothered to pay their victims much less help them in other ways, unless the government forced them to.
6Every time a Looney speaks, they should be reminded as to how their fantasy heroine Ayn Rand lived: on social security and medicare. Now the rest of us live at the mercy of her disciple Alan Greenspan’s fantasy of trickle down economics, as fueled by the B grade actor/president.
Combine the Looneys with the John Birchers to make Sharia Law seem like an improvement. That’s what the Koch brothers would sell to us.
The ironic thing is that their “small” government includes the ‘minor’ intrusion of vaginal probes, while the government the majority of us would support protects clean food, air and water.
Freedumb! Nothing spells Freedumb quite like being Libertarian “free” to acquire and spread bubonic plague.
7Waterboarding and theft were the only two thinks that worked well under The Shrub. Waterboarding didn’t do any good and, in fact, did a lot of harm but it worked as well as Richard Bruce Cheney wanted it to for his own gratification. And theft of public resources is always a hallmark of any well-run Republican organization.
8I read the Vermont story first (me going backwards as usual), but as with that one I have to quote Molly Ivins again about trying to say something funny or ironic about stories that come in on the teletype: “Some days it’s just rip and read.”
GOP (since 1980) and libertarians: they say government doesn’t work, and if you elect them, they prove it.
9Nice picture of the dumbass dubya ship of state stranded in a freeway debris pile North of Galveston. Pictures so capture the moment for the dumbass dubya one.
10Love the photo caption. That sums it up perfectly. In that libertarian spirit, what did John Stossel do to go to the Gulf Coast and help clean up after Katrina?
11Rhea-that’s some of them self-fulfilling prophecies wingnuts like to sprout. Imagine what could happen if they invested half of the hate and vitriol into improving America for the 99%.
12@jj
13“Looneytarians” eh? Wellllll that just got stole. And thanks!
“Nothing worked well under Bush.” I disagree. Everything worked well if you were a Bush sycophant. I read that it was the greatest transfer of wealth from public to private in the history of the world. That didn’t happen by mistake or without a plan.
14John, remember what Balzac said, “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.”
15John, honey. Sounds like you have been hitting some mad ganja!
16Nah, I think sociopath Cheney’s favorite torture tactic was anal rape. He euphemismistically called it “rectal feeding.” He’d probably be better off if he’d had days of “harsh rectal feeding interrogation techniques.”
17W. C. (Pete) Peterson @ #8 says: “And theft of public resources is always a hallmark of any well-run Republican organization.”
No truer words ever written…
18Good ol’ Juanita Jean…A very wise woman. Trusting big businesses to do good deeds is about like trusting a hungry fox not to get into the hen house.
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