There’s a guy running for Senator Patty Murray’s seat named Clint Didier. The teabaggers love him, whereas the mainstream corporate Republicans seem to be supporting Dino Rossi, who will probably win the primary and face Murray. In my opinion both Didier and Rossi are bad, for different reasons.
Anyway, Didier recently said something really stupid and teabaggerish and a local newspaper columnist zinged him. I thought it would be worth writing a diary for my DKos friends. You can read some more under the imaginary fold.
I’ll try to make this fairly short, at least compared to my usually well-researched and incredibly insightful essays (Dbug said with his tongue in his cheek).
First, a few things about Clint Didier. He grew up on a farm in WA. He played football in college and got drafted and played tight end for the Washington Redskins (in that other Washington, the city not the state – on the east coast). He earned two Super Bowl rings. He even scored a touchdown in the Super Bowl. After he retired from the NFL, he returned to his roots in Washington (the state) and became a farmer. He’s the teabagger in the Senate race; he’s been endorsed by both Sarah Palin and Ron Paul. He’s six-foot-five and he has one of those mustaches that was popular among gay men in the 1980s. Not that he’s gay (and not that there’s anything wrong with being gay). Magnum, P.I. (Tom Selleck) had a 1980s mustache and he’s not gay or a teabagger.
Here’s a picture of Clint Didier (with his heterosexual Tom Selleck mustache) from his glory days:
Today I bought a Sunday Seattle Times so I could have something to read as I quaffed a few delicious beers at a local watering hole. I’m not even gonna tell you the story I read about the 15 naked bike riders who rode from Belltown to Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill on Friday night, where they were stopped by police. They weren’t arrested or given citations. The police basically said, "Hey, put some clothes on." (Here’s the story: Seattle police shut down Naked Bike Ride.)
And the punchline of the story is this: The naked bike riders were stopped in front of a burger place called "Dick’s." Hey, stop showing your dicks in front of Dick’s! I know the sign says "Dick’s," but that’s informational, not a suggestion.
But I digress.
I also read a pretty good column in the Sunday paper by Paul Krugman where he said the Republicans are trying to go back to disastrous economic policies of GW Bush. Krugman is a smart guy. Someone should nominate him for a Nobel Prize.
Sorry. I’ll stop digressing.
Clint Didier: Hypocrite
Back to Didier, who wants to be our next Senator. A Seattle Times columnist named Danny Westneat wrote a pretty good column (which you can read in its entirety here if you’re so inclined: 'Self-made' myth divides us).
First, let me disgust you with a quote from Westneat quoting Didier:
"We've got to get rid of this ‘protecting the weak,’" Didier said. "If we keep the weak alive all the time, it eats up the strong."
I stared at that quote, thinking, "What the fuck? Really. What the fuck? If we keep the weak alive?"
Strong people, like Didier, apparently are winners. The losers in society are weaklings – the poor, the unemployed, the undereducated, the outsourced, the sick people without insurance, the homeless people without relatives, the unlucky, and so on. They should just fucking die, according to Didier. Why should the government waste money keeping them alive? They’re dragging down the rich, who are the strong and successful. Taxes hold back the rich people. Taxes are so unfair.
Then Westneat slips in the dagger. Here’s what he wrote:
His personal story is impressive, winning a Super Bowl and returning to run the family farm. That's true merit there. At the same time, I'm having a hard time thinking of two more socialistic enterprises than pro football or farming.
The National Football League is famed for its anti-capitalistic, share-the-wealth approach, where unionized players are guaranteed to make minimum salaries and rich teams give money to poorer ones so they can compete. Plus, taxpayers pick up the tab for the stadiums.
Washington state's farmers, likewise, simply couldn't survive on their own. They've been paid nearly $4 billion in federal cash subsidies since 1995 (Didier's alfalfa farm got $273,000 of that). Taxpayers and electricity ratepayers also pay more than 90 percent of the yearly costs of the Columbia Basin Project, the nation's largest system of dams and irrigation canals.
If Didier and his farm in what was once a desert (100 years ago) didn’t get water from federally subsidized irrigation projects, and hydroelectric power from federally built dams, and federal crop subsidies to grow alfalfa, he’d be one of the weak. He’s a hypocrite, making money from past government projects while railing against future government projects.
Then, at the end of the column, Danny Westneat offers a choice. Either we’re a nation of individuals where the strong win and the weak lose. Or maybe we can admit we’re members of a community where we can help each other succeed.
The real story is that it took extraordinary acts of community-building, on a national and local level, to turn Eastern Washington into a fruit and vegetable basket to the world. (It had big environmental costs, but that's another part of the story.)
Same with the public school systems (which Didier attended). The safety net for the elderly. The national parks. The electric grid. The public-health system. All, like the Columbia Basin Project, are communal in spirit and dramatically raised the quality of life in America.
So why do we pretend we didn't do them?
Why do we persist in this phony yarn that everyone got where they did solely by hard work and self-reliance?
I'll admit the truth isn't as romantic. But it's not the limpest story in the world, either — that we did it together.
Westneat is not a nationally syndicated columnist, so I thought I’d share some of his words with you. He summed it up very well.
Thanks for reading this.