Today I want to introduce you to a Republican Freshman Representative. His name is Jeff Landry (R-LA) and he is a real piece of work this guy.
You might have been hearing rumblings about this fella, he is the one that has so little respect for the presidency and the traditions of the Congress that he brought a sign that said “Drilling = Jobs” and flashed it whenever he could during the president’s jobs speech. After all he learned from Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson that shouting is a bridge too far, but apparently didn’t understand why it was a problem.
Rep. Landry has a long history of actually claiming to be clueless. Back when he was a police officer he was shocked (shocked I tell you!) to find that his police housemate had been hiding fairly large amounts of cocaine under their house.
Now we need to be clear here, he was never indicted as part of the cocaine hiding. He actually managed to convince the investigators that he really was so dim-witted that he did not notice anything while living at a house that a dirty cop was hiding cocaine under.
Still being a dim wit has never been an impediment to being a United States Representative, or even, for that matter, President. But Landry is not just dim, he is also mean spirited and that is a bad combination.
His biggest claim to fame, lately, is that he managed to piss off Michael Bromwich of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE. This is all part and parcel of the fight that Rep. Landry has been trying to pick with the White House about offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
He was invited to the White House a few months back to talk about the situation. He decided that his time was better spent elsewhere. Then last month he showed up at the Gulf office of BOEMRE and demanded to see the head administrators there. The problem was that they weren’t in the office that day, as the Congressman had not made an appointment.
He then demanded to see the person working on the permits he was most interested in. He was told that was not possible, it was against the policy of the agency and that he’d have to come back when the administrators were there. They even made an appointment for him.
This was not enough for ol’ Rep. Landry. He went and told the Times Picayune the following:
But in an interview after his questioning of Bromwich, the freshman Republican accused BOEMRE of acting "like the CIA and Gestapo" as he recounted how he was recently blocked from visiting the bureau's New Orleans office.
Landry said he had to wait 20 minutes in the lobby for an agency official to come down and inform him that the top officials in the office weren't in the office and that he would have to return another time. Landry said he wanted to learn about some stalled permits brought to his attention by a constituent.
He said he wasn't given access to the employee overseeing the permits. Landry said he eventually received a copy of the agency's staff telephone directory, but only after he threatened to file a Freedom of Information Act request.
Now if that reads like a petulant bully being pissed off over not getting everything he wants to you, then we are on the same page. What is best about this part of the Landry wall of shame is the reaction of Michael Bromwich to Landry calling his people “Gestapo”. He promptly wrote to the Representative and said that until he apologized to his staff for comparing them to the Nazi Secret Police, there would be no meeting with him.
Rep. Landry says he will not apologize because:
“Absolutely not, not one,” Landry (R-La.) said Tuesday evening when asked whether he had any regrets. “I mean I didn’t name-call them. I used it as an adjective or an adverb in saying it was like, it was similar.”
As long as we accept the “dim-wit” proposition this explanation makes sense. But beyond the oddly worded “name-call them” the fact is that he did call them names by comparing them to the CIA or the Gestapo. And that is before we get into the inherent comparison between our intelligence agency and the Nazi Secret Police.
But lets take the Representative at his word, that he was just saying they were similar. So he was saying that the BOEMRE staff who forced him to wait all of 20 whole minute while they tried to find someone for him to meet with are the similar to the people who were instrumental in rounding up and killing millions in the Nazi regime.
Check me if I am wrong here, but that probably still deserves an apology. To compare anyone to some of the most despicable humans in the history of humans is an offense that should not be allowed to go unanswered.
Landry is also one of those Republicans who believe that we should offset emergency disaster aid for the North-East. He is notorious for holding an alligator hunt as a fund raiser, and of course, he is one of the yahoos that is worried about having to vote for an omnibus spending bill.
Why is he worried about the last? Because, get this, it will be over 1,000 pages and he doesn’t think he can read and understand anything that long. Truly.
This is who the Republicans elect. I am sure there are more than a couple of knuckle-headed Democrats out there, but this guy is starting to be a rising star in Republican circles, yet another in the endless line of pseudo-tough guys that they trot out to say whatever it is the money interests want them to say.
It is worth bringing folks like this into the light and showing them for the petty mean-spirited and frankly dim-witted hacks they are.
The floor is yours.