I do believe Rep. Paul Broun may in fact be
a bit of an idiot:
A conservative member of the House warned that one consequence of the a weak economy is declining membership at country clubs.
"When someone is overextended and broke they don't continue paying for expensive automobiles, they sell the expensive automobiles and buy a cheaper one. They don't continue paying for country club dues, they drop out of the country club," Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) said Wednesday on MSNBC.
Yes! Won't somebody please think of the country clubs! What kind of monsters are we, if in this jobless so-called recovery, full of pain and misery and people who haven't been able to find a new job in 99 weeks and so therefore are dumped into the sarlacc pit, if the end result is declining country club memberships!
And the automobiles! The expensive automobiles! The slightly cheaper automobiles! Dashboards that lack narwhal-tusk inlays! Engines that can tolerate non-premium gasoline! Madness, swirling madness all around us! The unfamiliar shapes, the tacky, insufficiently coordinated colors! Visions of purchasing a mere Acura, with the salesmen all chanting one of us! One of us!
Yes, now the nightmare of America's worst recession since the "Great" one is really hitting home.
I think you can judge a person quite well from observing what gets their attention; Broun has had little interest in the plight of the little people, during this recession, and I imagine that people who might have to drop their country club memberships count as the closest thing he can viscerally recognize as a hardship. I suppose in his mind this makes the rest of us feel the pain of the only-vaguely-well-off, because after all, they are suffering too! Not in a "goddamn it, what am I going to feed the kids tonight when I haven't had a job in six months" way, but at least in a "this is going to significantly affect my opportunities for golf" sort of way.
Note that it's probably not the top one or two percent giving up their country club memberships, the poor overtaxed darlings, but the upper middle class. We've decided we don't even need a middle class in this country anymore, so I don't know what we're worried about: isn't this like the whole thing with the manatees? If God has decided that the American middle class needs to be chopped into fine bits by the actions of the wealthier and better off, then hey—sucks to be you, American middle class, but good tea party Republicans know not to interfere.
Broun also explained that this means we should be cutting the debt ceiling, not raising it, because blah blah magical fairies creating jobs with pixie magic blah blah, which is something like saying "hmm, I need to lose weight—bring me a sharp axe and shopping bag's worth of bandages, would you?" There is no rational basis for his belief: it is, in fact, garbage, and contains zero economic wisdom or even common sense. He believes it only because he believes that government should cut funding for everything involving the poor or the sick or the homeless, and this is momentarily the best way for him to promote that goal.
If you recall the apocryphal (and by "apocryphal," we mean almost certainly false) story of Marie Antoinette asking why the starving peasants could not just eat cake, it was not out of cruelty that she supposedly said it: she was so sheltered that she could not grasp that people who did not have bread would not have cake either. The quote was supposed to represent total obliviousness to the plight of anyone less privileged.
If we reinvented that quote for today, I'm sure it would involve either country clubs or luxury cars. We should ask Paul Broun to do it for us: he seems to be good at this sort of thing.