When a politician grandstands, you know it’s time to pull up a chair and get popcorn ready. It’s like they all saw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington when they grew up and realized that, with enough bullshitting, they could pretend to be Jimmy Stewart too!
on the floor of the House of Representatives, Jackson Lee encouraged Congress to compromise in order to avoid automatic budget cuts. According to the article, “Jackson Lee suggested lawmakers should take inspiration from President Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War” before saying, “I stand here as a freed slave because this Congress came together. Are we going to be able to do it today to free America?”
I never thought in my lifetime would a Congresswoman call herself a “freed slave” unless she ripped her clothes off and ran through the aisles in some bizarre display of performance art.
Also, wouldn’t Lincoln and every congressman from the 1860s be kinda pissed to hear that their monumental efforts in ending slavery would be used to argue against…automatic budget cuts a century and a half in a future? It would be like using the Declaration of Independence to sell Hondas on President’s Day weekend.
Rush Limbaugh responded:
LIMBAUGH: We’re not having much luck here, folks. We’ve been doing exhaustive research in the last four minutes. We’re trying to find out who owned and who sold Sheila Jackson Lee and what they got for her. She just said on the floor of the House of Representatives mere moments ago this morning, and she was standing there as a freed slave because this Congress came together. I didn’t think they were coming together at all, but she talked about the Congress during Lincoln. But anyway, she’s a freed slave. Somebody had to own her, and I — we don’t know who.
If you don’t laugh at this, you have a stick up your ass labeled “humorless political hack”.
Obviously, you know, with the makeup of culture today it didn’t have to be Houston that — the owner did not have to be where she lived, she could have been owned by anybody. What if a drug company owned her? You know, what if — what if big oil owned her and she didn’t know about it? Somebody freed her, though. We will keep looking to try to find out who owned her, who sold her, and what they got. I have to tell you, though, in all candor, I think she looks pretty good for her age. She’s got to be over 110. You’d never know it.
See how Limbaugh takes the usual liberal line that congressmen and congresswomen are owned by certain companies and applies it here?
Yet for this, Justin Berrier of Media Matters says that:
Limbaugh mocked Jackson Lee by ‘trying to find out who owned and who sold’ her and ‘what they got for her’
It’s clear that we should actually be mocking the woman who invoked slavery in the congressional record to argue against automatic budget cuts rather than a talk show host who questions the validity of those comments. But from this woozy liberal perspective, questioning is mocking and claiming to be a ‘freed slave’ is totally not insane for a sitting congresswoman.
