English, People

“Stimulus was supposed to be quick. In fact, they never intended to spend it and will not completely have effectively spent it until after the president’s re-elect. Always looking at how do you get the maximum hit when the president was up for re-elect.”

— Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, March 19, 2012

I came across this on March 21. Issa's lying about the stimulus, and his office, when asked for any evidence of the charge, had only slanders against Obama and no evidence. If you want to read about the falsehood of the charge about the stimulus, go to the Washington Post's Fact Checker.

Instead, I'm going to comment on Issa's illiteracy. For years now Republicans like Issa, who engage in eye poking and bomb throwing rather than reasoned policy dispute, have referred to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party. It's a Rush kind of childishness that I've presumed is intended to be a needling of Democrats.

Now, I see it's not childishness. It's just stupidity. Issa doesn't grasp that re-elect and re-election are two different forms of speech. The former is a verb and the latter a noun. Obama is seeking to have the voting public re-elect him. The campaign is for his re-election. See, not that hard to distinguish between them.

I guess the extra syllable of re-election was just too hard for Issa to muster. He had to save his energy for futile, fact free attacks on Obama. After all, he couldn't be bothered to put "the" in front of stimulus or a noun or pronoun in front of always.

Lazy thinking. The hallmark of today's GOP.