Mike Lee
Imagine if you called a plumber in to fix your bathroom and all he did was whack off into your sink all day. You might want to say to him, “I’m glad to see you’re passionate about your work, but how the hell is this fixing a goddamn thing?!” That’s what Tea Party voters are facing with the goons they sent to Washington in 2010, especially our Asshole dishonoree Mike Lee, freshman U.S. senator from Utah.
So far Congressional Republicans in the House have voted 40 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 40! Guess how many times they voted to repeal their own government-subsidized healthcare. You guessed it. In Lee’s brain, Tea Party rookies like him were elected “specifically with the charge to stop Obamacare,” so they’re obligated “to do everything in their power to stop it.”
But since legislative repeal is about as likely as Sarah Palin explaining string theory, Mike Lee and his Senate cohorts have been lubing their members to a defunding fantasy. The plan, if you can call it that, is to block any budget funding the Affordable Care Act, thereby threatening a government shutdown that—in their wet dreams—everyone will blame on Obama. Hey, if you can’t fix the plumbing, blow up the bathroom!
As for the people in his own party who think he’s an ass-clown (which is most of them), Mike Lee squeezed this old chestnut out of his rectum for them to chew on: “The fact that they’re against it simply tells me that I must be doing something right.” To think this guy’s been called arrogant!
Mike Lee wants you to think he’s a regular, aw-shucks yokel who went to Washington to kick some ass. The reality is, he’s an insider’s insider, a lawyer who clerked for right wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and was indoctrinated by his dad, Utah’s notorious Rex Lee. Big Daddy served as Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general and later became president of Brigham Young University, where all the master Mormon-bots are built. Mitt Romney was indoctrinated there. But compared to Mike Lee, Mitt’s a raving heathen.
At age ten, by all accounts, Lee was more conservative than his dad. Obsessed with states’ rights, the brat carried around a hard-on for the big bad federal government. Daddy made sure his rancid seed got the golden pass at BYU, then croaked from cancer and chronic self-righteousness. Even though ol’ Rex shriveled into a miserable end likely caused by nuclear-test fallout, his son still fought to let radioactive waste be dumped into Utah and now wants to cripple healthcare. If there’s one thing “Let ’Em Suffer” Lee ain’t got, it’s a human heart.
He also hasn’t gotten that Congress isn’t a church. He talks about rights in religious terms, even comparing the Declaration of Independence (a real thing) with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (a shaky story at best). His approach to the Constitution—which he treats the way Fundamentalists treat the Bible—is what’s called “originalist.” A country’s basic law evolves as the society matures, but an originalist thinks it can only mean what people understood it to mean when it was ratified. Lee, in other words, is living 200-plus years in the past. Even his own BYU professors were creeped out, calling him “very, very conservative.”
But ultimately his originalism is bullshit too. Since taking office, Lee’s been pimping for amendments that will never happen, including a spending cap, term limits for legislators and a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment to prevent “anchor babies” (his words) from being citizens. Oh, and he doesn’t think the government should guarantee a minimum wage, enforce civil rights or ban child labor either.
Just getting warmed up, Lee recently shat out his vision for the country. It’s something he calls the “Utah Model,” a magical “voluntary civil society” in which Mormonesque pod people “harness individuals’ self interest to the common good.” So next time you need to pay for that cancer treatment, just knock on your neighbor’s door. No need for Obama care in the Utah States of America!
After Lee won his Senate seat, newspapers from Salt Lake City’s Deseret News to The Washington Post advised him to not storm into office with a bullhorn, but to take it slow and build alliances if he was interested in political longevity. Fat chance. Not only is Lee the playground bully, he’s also a colostomy bag of contradiction.
His claim that “raising taxes on the rich will hit the poorest among us hardest” is already a classic. Later, in an interview with his personal groupie Rush Limbaugh, Lee claimed that Obamacare was “universally despised” outside the D.C. Beltway, but Republicans in Congress were scared to join his defunding effort because once the law really kicked in, “it is going to be liked,” just like Social Security and Medicare (which he also wants to slash). Let’s get this straight. Right now Obamacare is hated, but most people will soon come around to see that it’s actually a good thing? Even its biggest enemy is admitting this? So why doesn’t he leave it the fuck alone already?
It’s because he’s got two groups to rim – job: 1) “grassroots” (poor) bigots who want to smackdown the uppity black President (when Lee says “Obamacare,” he means “Obama”) and 2) the handful of libertarian fatcats who want to keep sucking America’s wealth, untaxed, to the top of their pyramid scheme.
Maybe Mike Lee sincerely wants what’s best for the country. He just doesn’t understand that the best thing would be if he quit politics, became a shitty plumber and literally spent all of his time whacking off into strangers’ sinks. That’s about as close to the “common good” as he’ll ever get.
