Oregon Asshole Award (January 2013): Greg Walden

Seems that the little man from Oregon's 2nd Congressional District has his little panties in a twist about the dreaded platinum coin:

"My wife and I have owned and operated a small business since 1986. When it came time to pay the bills, we couldn’t just mint a coin to create more money out of thin air. We sat down and figured out how to balance the books. That’s what Washington needs to do as well."

Well.

Isn't that special?

Except - unlike a "small business" (which are liable to fail and often do) - the collapse of the federal government because some asshole wants to play tiddlywinks with the "debt ceiling", a business utterly adrift from both the letter and the spirit of the entire magilla, would be more than a trifle irking (As Charlie Pierce notes, "It would be a substantial inconvenience to the rest of us if the U.S. government closed down and was replaced in the strip mall by a Jiffy Lube outlet or a tattoo parlor.")

Not to mention "balancing the books" in the tag-end of the Great Recession...

Not to mention the notion that a Republican can say the word "debt" without blushing..

Not to mention the notion that a Republican, any Republican, who voted for the Bush tax cuts can open his piehole about "debt", or "balancing books", or, well, pretty much ANY fiscal issue and be taken seriously.

Ever.

Again.

Not to mention...

Fuck that. Let's stop mentioning other things and take a little closer squint at this asshole, shall we?

First of all, this fuckstick didn't "own and operate a small business" like he was some sort of gritty little entrepreneur or the guy who built up the hardware store from scratch and sweat.

He was gifted a group of radio stations by his daddy, Paul Walden, who had bought up a bunch of radio outlets in Oregon shitkicker country back when it was really shitkicker country. Sonny started sweeping the floor in Daddy's station KIHR and then moved up in the family business (then Columbia Gorge Broadcasters, Inc. now Bicoastal Media Licenses IV, LLC) until daddy-o "sold" him the outfit back in the Eighties.

He was the owner of this five-station "empire" until the middle Oughts, when he unloaded it to prevent a conflict-of-interest problem.

This guy wasn't exactly the lovable local druggist or menswear shop owner. He was the Mister Carlson of the dry side of Oregon, running a business that made nothing other than sound and consumed nothing other than electricity and advertising.

But let's let Jon Chait take the asshole's "small business" farrago to its logical conclusion:

"Suppose the problem is that we’re a business whose expenses are outstripping our income. We propose some measures to correct it — say, cutting expenses when possible and also working some longer hours. But we have a business partner who listens to a lot of Rush Limbaugh and has some different ideas. He says increasing revenue by working longer hours — even a single longer minute when we have customers waiting in line at closing time — is totally off the table. He says the answer is to cut our employees’ pay and ban them from taking bathroom breaks. And he also informs us that, unless we approve the savings ideas he wants, with none of the savings ideas we want, he’ll refuse to pay vendors who have already delivered things to us, thereby ruining our credit rating forever.

That would be terrible! You would probably stop thinking about optimal ways to run your business and start looking for back-door solutions to prevent your crazy business partner from permanently ruining your credit rating."

Y'think?

I was mildly irked over the entire debt ceiling kabuki before, but the part this Oregon asshole is playing has really got my back up. Fuck you, Walden, and your redneck pals in West Gepip, OR.

We've got millions of people out of work, people who WANT work, people who are at the end of their string, unable to stay in their homes, unable to hold their heads up...and, yet, there you are, as fatheaded and clueless as a junkyard goat and as worthless as a tampon in a typhoon, getting paid a handsome wage to sit in a comfortable office on Capitol Hill and come up with nothing better than this ignorant, poop-flinging monkey shit to deal with the mess that your incontinent Republican pals are making?

You are one of the most worthless excrescences ever to emerge from Oregon, and I wouldn't spit on you for the disrespect to my own spit.

Asshole.