Randi Rhodes: More Hostage Taking

Developing: President Obama has requested a joint session of Congress next Wednesday (9/7) night for his major jobs speech - the next GOP primary debate will be held at the same time (ha!).

The White House has accused Congressional Republicans of holding disaster relief hostage to their demands for steep budget cuts. What clued them off? The ransom demand? Really, Congressional Republicans might as well just have stated their position using words cut out from magazines like an old-fashioned kidnapper’s note. “America! Send us one billion dollars in budget cuts in a plain brown envelope, or you will never see rural Vermont or parts of upstate New York again.” It’s hard to come up with an analogy more absurd than the reality here. If the Republicans were blocking funding for anything else, we’d be saying “What next? Are they going to block funding for disaster relief?”

Nowadays conservatives want to destroy FEMA by denying it funding. But remember back when Bush was president, they could try to destroy it by putting a moron in charge of it? Yes, George Bush’s former FEMA director, Michael Brown, has weighed in with his opinion on aid for Hurricane Irene victims, four days after the storm hit. Hey, that’s a lot faster than he reacted to Hurricane Katrina! Michael Brown was on Fox News, supporting hostage-taker Eric Cantor’s position that we shouldn’t give aid to disaster victims until we make matching budget cuts. That approach would certainly have made Michael Brown’s job easier during Katrina. He could have blamed his incompetence on Congress’s intransigence. Why is this guy on TV? Every time I see Michael Brown’s face on the screen, my first thought is “My God, has there been some sort of emergency involving Arabian horses?” Of course Fox News has Brown on as an expert in disaster relief. He’s the world’s worst failure in disaster relief! It’s like having Christine O’Donnell on as an expert on how to win an election. They say those who can’t do, teach. Those who do really, really poorly end up being experts on the subject at Fox News.

An interesting point came up in Dick Cheney’s interview with Sean Hannity—due to all the hardware inside of his chest taking the place of an actual heart, Dick Cheney does not have a pulse. Wow. Now I’m even more creeped out by Cheney. The only way Dick Cheney could be any creepier is if he had Paul Ryan’s hair.

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Connecticut's Gov. Dannel Malloy summed up Ron Paul's war on FEMA with five simple words: "I think he's an idiot."