SHOCKED AT THE SHOCK

"I'm shocked at the shock"

The video I'm going to link here is actually old by internet standards - over a week - but it took me this long to run down the transcript. I wanted to not just throw up a vid but to give the transcript and some analysis, so it had to wait til now. So the video is all over the internet (you can watch it here at Breitbart.tv) if you want to see the C-Span feed.

Previous to the McCotter speech (his name, by the way, is gloriously old fashioned, Thaddeus: you just don't see names like that any more. The man isn't old fashioned, he played lead guitar a rock band called The Second Amendments) there was a segment by Representative Steven LaTourette (R-OH) noting that he was shocked that anyone could claim to be shocked at the AIG bonuses, seeing as the majority of them voted for those bonuses to be protected after throwing out an amendment that would have specifically prohibited their payment as part of the bailout deal.

He then demanded that a Democrat stand up and defend this behavior and tell who threw out the Wyden-Snowe amendment mentioned above and inserted protection of bonuses into the bill. No Democrat responded.

That was followed by a few other short statements, Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) stood up and made this speech:

I too am shocked at the shock. When the stimulus bill came through the House, there were warnings from the minority party that we did not have time to read it, that we would find in that bill things that would be egregious and outrage the sensibilities of the American people.

But I will give credit where credit is due. It is, in fact, in this part a stimulus bill, for it stimulated the greed of the bonus babies at AIG because it protected and approved taxpayer-funded bonuses to that bailed-out company.

Facts are hard things to disprove. Every single Democrat in this House that voted for that bill voted to approve and protect those AIG bonuses. Every single Democrat in the Senate that voted for that stimulus bill, along with three Republican Senators, voted to approve and protect those AIG bonuses. The President of the United States signed into law the protection and approval of those AIG bonuses that they now find so repugnant now that the American people know what was done.

In my mind, this was part of a deliberate strategy to keep the employees at AIG who had broken the bank there to fix the mess that they had made. They knew that this Congress would not go alone with the executive bonuses being paid to bail out companies. They had to protect them with this amendment. It was dropped in in the dead of night.

If you are shocked, be shocked at the Members of your own party or administration that put it in and be shocked that we will now pass a bill of attainder that is unconstitutional to try to cover our, shall we say, tracks on this matter.

Here is the sad reality of where we are today. In a time of crisis, they passed the Wall Street bailout. The nightmarish prognostications of myself and others have been exceeded. Now what we find is an attempt to cover one's tracks with another bill in a time of crisis that will leave no one, no one, safe from the hand of the taxman when the politicians come to cover their tracks at your expense.

The public deserves better. The public deserves transparency. We cannot fail them again.

McCotter's delivery is smooth and dry, and carries a wink with it, and his voice is strong and commanding. In short, he was a terrific success. McCotter has a strong future in politics, even if he's not exactly the conservative some think.

Yet he brings up certain points that nobody wanted to address - and indeed were simply ignored by the Democrats. Representative McCotter's points are like knives jammed into the opposition's balloon of hypocrisy, claiming they are shocked at the very thing they deliberately voted for and specifically inserted into the legislation to protect. I wish more American people knew about this - which is why I'm posting this now, to hopefully reach a few more people and spread the word a little more.

The Democratic response was pathetic, it never even attempted to defend their hypocrisy, once that was pointed out all of the discussion suddenly turned to the need for a bailout and absurd, outrageous claims of President Bush being to blame for the gigantic deficits that they personally ran up. They can't defend it. All they can do is try to deflect attention. And I wonder if many of them are even aware of their hypocrisy despite it being so clearly stated. I think they pushed it aside and went on with their plan of attack: Republicans caused disaster, we're fixing it, somehow, by spending this money and it would have been worse without the spending. Somehow.

I expect almost none of them read the amendment - certainly we know none of them read the stimulus bill in the House of Representatives because nobody got an actual copy of the bill before voting.

This is what your government has become. You need to know this, and so do your friends and co workers.