“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”
– Rita Mae Brown , but frequently attributed to Albert Einstein
The last time Saxby Chambliss’ Georgia seat in the US Senate was contested, it was by Democrat Jim Martin in 2008. The general election ended in a run-off. This writer, normally a Republican and fanatically conservative, endorsed Jim Martin out of sheer fright of the damage “Taxby,” as he is known in Georgia, might do with another term. After all, Chambliss had voted for the now $17 trillion Medicare D unfunded liability, the Patriot Act that took our constitutional rights, and a smorgasbord of outrageous government spending.
None of that mattered to Augusta radio talker Austin Rhodes. There isn’t a smidgen of independence in his body when it comes to partisan politics. There is no “Republican” too objectionable to be supported to the hilt. Humorously, there is a Georgia prison system that has come to house many of his favorites. When it came to voting for Martin, Rhodes yammered about how important it was to vote for the “conservative” Chambliss for the sake of avoiding the dangerous liberal Supreme Court justice appointments Democrat Martin might vote to approve and all of the perils that the “liberal” Martin might engender.
Chambliss won.
Oops! Chambliss voted for the nomination of John Roberts to be the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Roberts voted for Obamacare, the greatest Republican-feared monster ever.
Read that one slowly. The “conservative” Austin wanted and got to avoid disastrous liberal court decisions voted for the Justice delivering the biggest liberal program that could be imagined!
Sadly, the damage that the GOP establishment clown Taxby would go on to inflict will likely result in the financial collapse of America! Chambliss was the ranking member on the Agriculture Committee when the chance came to reform the colossal $400 trillion financial derivatives markets that caused the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse. Derivatives were the biggest problem, because these insurance “contracts” where written without the reserves required by every state insurance commissioner and didn’t keep enough money to pay off the contracts when they became bad gambling debts. This came from a Saxby Chambliss vote in 2000. Worse than that, they were made even better than our money in the banks by a worse Chambliss vote that allowed mixing of the bad gambling debts with insured bank deposits!
Readers probably understand that they can call their insurance agent to place a binder on insurance for their new car. However,those binders cannot be deposited and spent . That requires a cash transaction. They aren’t “money good”. Well, in the panic of 2008, $10 million increments of insurance binders/derivatives/gambling bets were being made whole at taxpayer expense with the bailout of AIG.
$10 million or more in our money went to reimburse a phone conversation memo? Most employees cannot get $250 travel costs paid with no receipts!
Jim Martin would never have been in a position to correct these catastrophic errors. Saxby/Taxby was as the ranking member of the Agriculture Committee. Did he demand that no longer could phone calls cost taxpayers $100’s of billions in total? Watch this for yourselves.
There you have it. There are more derivatives now than in 2008 and they can still be a phone call, thanks to Saxby Chambliss.
Now, in 2014, Austin Rhodes is still hawking US Senate candidates based upon their party affiliations, citing possible court nominations and legislation.
This writer is with Austin in supporting Republican David Perdue, having campaigned for him to the hilt in the primary season.
Perdue or even Democrat Michelle Nunn are far more capable than the retiring Chambliss.
Let’s hope this time Austin has it right, even if the reasoning isn’t sound by Einstein standards.
(Editor’s Note: The above installment of the Washington Journal is included for context in a journalistic/ educational discussion. The use of said content is covered under Fair Use and with respect to C-Span, and is embedded hereby for the public good in this respect.)