I knew it couldn't last.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

I'll give Chris Lee credit: he actually did alright for a few months. Mostly by being quiet and not really doing anything. But compared to him actually speaking his mind, that was good.

Well, that's over. Apparently he's either been taken in by the RNC's self-delusion that Obama is weak and beatable; Or else the fact that he's been voting for a lot of Democratically supported legislation has him taking flak from the lunatic wing of his base. Whatever way you slice it, he's back out and on a media campaign, bashing cap-and-trade.

I was going to go into a long dissection of why what he's saying isn't true, but what does it matter? Lee's taking his talking points straight out of the Republican National Committee faxes, which tends to be a self-discrediting form of spin. After they've been wrong about everything else from Iraq to Katrina to Lily Ledbetter, their credibility on this stuff outside their 30% base is negligible, particularly when you're arguing against a President who's got a 60+ percent approval rating.

So it wouldn't matter much to point out to Lee that, say, the EPA ran the numbers and determined that the extra cost to an average American household would be between $70 and $140 a year. Compare that now to the extra $1100 a year that people were paying under the energy plan that Chris Lee supports. Lee's sound-bite spin tour, the media equivalent of a smash and grab, has all the veracity of a puppet show.

Meanwhile, in other Lee-misbehavior news, he had a meeting early this month with a group called the Healthcare Lobbying Council. Not surprisingly, the "Healthcare Lobbying Council" is a group made up of the CEOs of insurance companies, big hospitals, and drug conglomerates. And it's staffed by--wait for it--the same people who lobby against healthcare reform for the prescription drug industry. Not to mention a few of their lobbyists can also boast of having Exxon Mobil and the far-right American Petroleum Institute for a client.

So the bigwigs get to have a nice discussion by invite with Lee about "advancing market-based healthcare" (PDF link), which is the preferred code-phrase for "we charge whatever the market will bear." Whereas his own constituents have to practically invade his office en masse to get any face time.