Sunday, January 30, 2011

Dennis Kucinich Is in the Pits

If you haven't been following political trivia over the past week or so, you might have missed this newsworthy item: Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is suing the company that runs the House cafeteria for $150,000. The issue: Denny apparently bit into a vegetarian sandwich purchased there and hit an olive pit. This traumatic encounter, we are to believe, not only caused dental damage but ongoing mental anguish. Read more of the ludicrous details--and some pungent commentary--here.

Kucinich has served seemingly forever as the representative of Cleveland's West Side, additionally including some western and southern suburbs. Throughout the course of his service, he's run for President at every opportunity, badmouthed the United States publicly when visiting abroad, and failed to do anything to get a bailout for National City Bank during the financial crisis, causing its forced sale to Pittsburgh-based PNC--with the loss of a significant number of corporate jobs that down-and-out Cleveland could little afford to lose.

For some bizarre reason, Denny's constituents continue to re-elect this national laughingstock. Since I hail from that area originally, I'm told that Denny's "constituent service" is superb. That may be. But I wouldn't define constituent service as trotting around the country and the globe running for President pretty much as a socialist. And I wouldn't define constituent service as not lifting a finger to help out the nation's 10th largest bank, even as fellow Congresspeople (read Barney Frank) shamelessly saved their own hometown institutions.

Which gets us back to the olive pit. With the budget in crisis, with the Middle East falling apart, with millions of Americans still out of work--including a ton of Ohioans, with a looming Obamacare that we can't pay for, and a looming Social Security implosion, why the hell is Denny suing over a olive pit, at least three years after the fact, BTW? Maybe because, in the end, as with a lot of Congressmen, it's all about Denny. It may also say a lot about his personal finances. With his gold-plated Congressional medical and dental benefits (as a good socialist, surely he hasn't opted out), what's the beef here anyway?

Answer: like all Democrats, Denny probably figures that any inconvenience he runs into must therefore be somebody's fault, probably some rich capitalist who made 2 cents' profit off that (allegedly) ill made sandwich. Therefore, income must be redistributed. Denny has always had a problem with father figures and authority figures. His latest antics would seem to be an extension of this lifelong pattern, since there's really no rational reason for his behavior.

Fortunately for all Ohioans and all Americans, it looks like the Republican-controlled state legislature and Governor Kasich will remedy the Kucinich problem shortly. Under ruinous Democrat control for ages, cities like Cleveland and Toledo have been hemorrhaging jobs and population since the 1960s. As a result, Ohio has been gradually losing U.S. Representatives after each census. They've lost another seat this year. Buzz is that Denny's district will simply be drawn right out of the map, with adjacent re-gerrymandered districts gobbling it up. Sadly, what the voters wouldn't do for themselves, Columbus will now have to accomplish.

Meanwhile, Denny will have to leave the limelight, go back to Cleveland, and find someone else to sue. How pathetic can you get?


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