The grey-bearded Obey (an apt last name, though he be saying it differently, like in Obi Wan Kinobi) has been repping Wisconsin's 7th District (a vast mostly rural expanse creeping down from the northwest corner towards the geographic middle of the state) since April 1, 1969, a little less than four years before I was born. And I feel old. You know why Obey, who grew up a Republican, joined the Democratic Party? Because of a teacher being falsely accused during the McCarthy era. THE MCCARTHY ERA! But he leans conservative amongst Democrats, and is the third longest continuously serving active member of the House, behind the two dudes from Michigan up above. What the hell is it with rust belt congressmen being in office forever? At the time of being sworn in, at age 30 at the time, he was the youngest member of Congress. Nearly 41 years later, he has the relative youth to stay in Congress for another decade, and is already the longest serving Congressmen of either chamber to have served in Wisconsin history. But the fact that a guy born in Oklahoma, who grew up in Wisconsin and went to college there, could get elected at age 30, and then you double his life, and he's spent over a full half of it shuttling back and forth between D.C. and Wisconsin, pretending to represent the values of the local people he only spends part of the year with, it's fucking retarded. You cannot tell me that this guy, who I'm going to make the blanket assumption is probably a well-off individual to a certain extent (real estate broker was his listed profession before going off to Congress), can truly be in touch with the feelings of his constituents. And this is why pork barrel bullshit happens, because rather than truly represent people, they just get these goofy earmarks to throw into campaign ads and be like, "I got you all this $7 million dollar bullshit thing," or something or other, and can throw up posters of big shiny complexes as testaments to their legislative purity. Man, fuck a Congress.
No comments:
Post a Comment