There are two kinds of men that Southwest Missouri is notable for: some are real visionaries, people who can find a way to make the seemingly incomprehensible mess of the world make sense.
However, it also produces another kind of man in quantity, the hill-billy huckster. The man who, while pretending to be an ordinary sort of man from the hills, is something else again. Missouri produces alot of those, men who could sell scales to a snake. In many ways its the converse of the first type: instead of imaging great stories, they make up terrible ones.
Roy Blunt is a man of this second type.
Southwest Missouri is the "buckle of the bible belt", it has produced some great men. Edwin Hubble was one, the man who, more or less, discovered the universe, and one of the two or three most important observers of the visible light era of astronomy. It was he who showed human beings that the lived in a universe whose age is writ on every object that they see. I could add many others, but I'll simply reference my
grandfather, who invented the shadow x-ray microscope, the first commericial microscope that could use x-rays. There is also
Payne Stewart. America owes alot to hill billies, once you set the list down. I'm sure people know some others. Bill Clinton and Wesley Clark both have a touche of that world about them. It's a self-reliant world, because the Ozarks are at the other end what was for generations a great inland ocean of poverty running through appalachia.
Let me tell you about good old god fearing Roy Blunt, whose pack is named "Rely on your beliefs". He left his first wife. Everyone out there in those parts knows teh details of it. Left her with little and alone, so that he could marry his new lobbyist wife. He takes care of her. But isn't the GWOT about making the world safe for smoking? That kind of juice has to buy something.
Including a big new spread in Northern Virginia. And a reprimand from Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the same party. That's saying something, when the man who is DeLay's teddy bear can't take an ethics violation.
Now someone's personal life is, normally, personal, but this is a man who went out after Bill Clinton for his personal life, so it is in play as far as I'm concerned.
But let's talk about how Roy Blunt received gifts from Abramoff's restaurant. That's not personal, that begins to reek.
I've seen in him in action, he was busy snapping at a senior citizen who didn't like Bush's drug cards. He was nearly apoplectic with rage and had to contain himself when she said she couldn't decide which one, and there weren't enough details. Even before then he was snappish and arrogant. You could tell from his face that he thought his son was soon going to be governor of Missouri - right about that. If I had any evidence for it, other than what one local Republican told me not for attribution, I'd say he believed that he was the father of a future President. But, I won't, because it's a bad idea to say that sort of thing without a tape recording.
He's also a racist. Remember the anti-French jokes being spread around before the invasion of Iraq on fake evidence of WMD? Well Roy Blunt is the author of a couple, and was, according to one account, still repeating them in 2004. I don't take kindly to people telling jokes about allies in time of war, and France is our ally in the declared by Congress Global War on Terrorism. Mr. Blunt may not like that they didn't decide to join us in the snipe hunt on the Tigris, but disrespecting the army you are fighting along side of is bad for morale.
The other thing about Roy Blunt that gets whispered out there is how he rose to power. You see, it isn't normal for a man to jump from clerk to congress, and many out there in Southwest Missouri believe that Roy Blunt fixes elections. They talk about how it is strange that in many close races, the "right" person always wins. This isn't just in the general, but in the primary. Now again, I don't have evidence for this, and won't level the accusation, but there is alot of talk about it.
Alot.
But these aren't what should get people mad about Roy Blunt. What should get them mad is that he is, almost single handedly, trying to poison your children.
Out on the two costs, people tend to think of energy as being about oil. Well, have news for you, for much of the country, electricity is as big an issue, and that issue is coal. There are vast coal fields in the Mid-West, in a belt stretching from Illinois to Kansas and Oklahoma. Getting at it would require lunar the broad plains, and choking the mighty Mississippi-Missouri river basin with the sludge and products of that descecration of the earth. It would make large swathes useless for agriculture. More over, much of that coal is high in impurities, its why we don't mine it now. But get people desperate enough, they'll burn everything.
And Roy Blunt is just the man to sell it to you. It might seem strange that a corner of the country that is doing all sorts of good work on sustainable fuels, also produces a man who has had tens of thousands of dollars energy pac contributions coming in. But that is the hill billy reality - there are those who find their faith in self-reliance. And then there is Roy Blunt who sells five thousand dollar pancakes.
A world with the coal fired plants that Roy Blunt is pushing is one where there are mercury stains across the land, a leaching poisoning.
Now, he's already raised $438,537 in PAC contributions for the 2005-2006 cycle. Bribery is legal, remember, so long as it is a campaign contribution. That may seem like a lot, but he spent $3,527,363 to win an election 70-28. 1.4 million of that was Pac money, and 10% of that was utility and mining money. Now why would electricity companies give 80,000 dollars to a man from South West Missouri? Have they found a way to tap the kerogenes? No.
Westar is a name you should get more familiar with. DeLay charged $25,000 for access, and Blunt went along only to withdraw his hand at the last minute. Westar, you see wanted to transfer billions on its balance sheet so that it could charge those as rate hikes, rather than pay them down out of profits. DeLay and Texans for a Republican Majority outlined exactly what the pay for play would be - who would give how much to who - in return for the help. Westar then turned to Blunt:
Blunt asked Tauzin and energy subcommittee chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, to include the break. Blunt serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and is expected to become the third-ranking House Republican next year."
So Blunt's been involved for a long time in plans to bilk consumers of billions in higher energy costs, and part of the key team that has been pushing to remove environmental restrictions on power generation. And he has profitted from it handsomely.
You see, Blunt has wanted to climb the greasy poll of the house leadership, and has been a long time defender of DeLay's sleaze machine. These incidents aren't isolated, they are aggravated corruption, which has been business as usual.