Cantor, during one of his terribly nonconfrontational threats to defund
all of government rather than something-something-something.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, poster child for holding government hostage, holding disaster relief hostage, sabotaging talks between the president and the House, walking
out of talks between the president and the House, condemning the Occupy protests as "mobs" whereas the tea partiers were nice, upstanding patriots and such, is sad. He is sad because he thinks he's being unfairly demonized for, well, doing all that stuff I just mentioned. So he is launching a campaign to
show everyone that he's really a nice guy:
Cantor is allowing CBS News’s “60 Minutes” cameras into his life, filming his three children and wife to show that he’s not the hard-line ideologue that has become the object of Democratic caricature. He’s invited the “60 Minutes” cameras to spend Thanksgiving with his family; Leslie Stahl is slated to be the reporter on the piece.
In an effort to humanize him, Cantor’s staff has started an online video series called “Snapshot of the Leader,” which depicts Cantor’s daily routine in short bits. The first installment had him talking about the “American dream” and “trying to promote achievement and success for everyone.” There will be a dozen of these rolled out on Cantor’s website.
See there? He can't possibly be a guy who would rather drive government to the brink of default than allow even one damn cent more taxes on extremely rich Americans and corporations while blocking tax cuts directed towards workers and the middle class. He's got a family. Nobody with a family can possibly be an asshole.
Cantor planned a speech at the University of Pennsylvania to talk about a favorite progressive topic — income inequality. His speech included hundreds of words about his immigrant grandmother, who came to the United States from Eastern Europe and lived above her late husband’s supermarket in Richmond, Va., after being widowed at age 30.
But the event was canceled when the Service Employees International Union and the Occupy Philadelphia protest movement threatened to fill the 300-person audience. That won’t stop Cantor — he has upcoming speeches planned at Northwestern University and Rice University. Of the cancellation at Penn, Cantor said there was “no sense” in giving a speech about “trying to pull people together” to an audience of “100 percent professional protesters.”
I read that whole speech, and it was gawdawful. It was boring, rambling, and not even good enough to make fun of. It had nothing to do with "income inequality," it was just a muddled mess of aspirational nothingness and assertions that everyone needs to work harder and start more businesses, damn it, and then everything will be fine. The audience owes Cantor one for not subjecting them to it. The only thing any of us gained from that failed non-speech is the knowledge that Eric Cantor literally cannot talk coherently about income inequality even when he tries.
But it is this, I think, that comes closest to showing the true Eric Cantor:
When both Hurricane Irene and an earthquake hit Virginia this summer, Cantor said Congress “will find the money” to help victims rebuild, likening increasing disaster relief to a family going without a new car or an addition on their house to afford care for a “sick loved one.” The sound bite turned into a months-long push on the left to say that Cantor was trying to withhold money from those in need. Cantor called it a “disingenuous” depiction by a media that he thinks has a political “bent.”
But he does seem to have a tinge of regret on this one.
“I would’ve said it differently,” Cantor said, referring to the disaster-relief comment. “Again, we never said we wouldn’t let the disaster money get there. … There are others on the other side of the building who think they could go and make political hay of it — I guess I believe in people more.”
Cantor says he never meant that they "wouldn't let the disaster money get there." But here's the thing: They didn't let the damn disaster money get there.
With Congress still toiling over how to pay for federal disaster funding, reconstruction projects in 42 states totaling $447 million are on hold, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency records.[...]
The reconstruction and disaster mitigation projects—mostly road, bridge and public building repairs—are in limbo because FEMA’s disaster relief fund is almost out of money. [...]
Following the late August storm that walloped 12 states, FEMA took emergency measures by suspending payments for older projects in order to provide immediate hurricane relief along the East Coast.
So Eric Cantor is mostly mad, it seems, that people have accurately stated the outcomes of his positions, and not just gone with his bald-faced lies about those positions. Keep in mind that the battle to not provide FEMA with money was a real one, with real hostility behind it: When FEMA juggled money around to try to keep their operations going, rather than abandon disaster aid entirely for some victims, they were met with a Republican investigation into the matter, with House Republicans accusing FEMA of lying to them about how much money they needed in the first place. That's how peeved the House GOP was at FEMA trying to "let the disaster money get there."
I understand that Cantor is frustrated with being thought poorly of. I also do not find it particularly surprising that, upon realizing he is thought poorly of, Cantor blames everyone but himself for "demonizing" him and his absurdly unpopular, downright mean-spirited positions. So now we're going to get a few fluff pieces about Eric Cantor, normal everyman, sitting down to eat Thanksgiving dinner, with the sure knowledge that nobody who eats Thanksgiving dinner can possibly be a bad fellow, and we're supposed to ignore all of those incidents with Cantor threatening to shut down government, and Cantor walking away from debt talks, and Cantor steamrolling his own will over that of the ostensible House leader, and Cantor and allies forcing FEMA to ration disaster relief while the House bickers about what they should be cutting in order to provide that relief.
Instead, Eric Cantor will give a few speeches about the ungrateful masses who need to suck it up and work harder so that he can continue cutting taxes on the richest Americans, and we'll get a dozen or so tapes from his office showing how very human and likeable he is, while spouting the same message, and then six months from now after the government has nearly shut down yet again, after whatever the latest bout of ideology-obsessed incompetence the House decides to embark on next, Eric Cantor, friend to the people, will once again sit at his desk and wonder why the hell he is so unpopular.
