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A Snap Shot of Congressional Arrogance

-By Warner Todd Huston

POLITICO posted a piece last week that shows the arrogance of our duly elected Senators in Washington D.C. After reading this piece, one gets the impression that this good old boys club is not only one that not just anyone is allowed to join but one that finds itself beyond even the voters that put them there. It is an arrogance of self-assumed stature in this great Republic that is galling and should be.

The piece, headlined “Mark Kirk not sorry for Senate ‘end zone dance,'” was all full of the tsk tsking by nose-in-the-air senators that didn’t like the fact that newly minted Senator Mark Kirk was ebullient about the GOP having won a recent legislative victory. It was gauche, these senators said, not proper, completely untoward, over-the-top, low-rent, “amateurish,”and entirely eyebrow raising.

What did Senator Kirk do to cause all this finger wagging to be unleashed like a torrent in his direction? In a news conference Kirk put on a “demeanor” that amounted to “spiking a football on the decorous Senate floor,” after the GOP defeated the Democrat’s $1.1 trillion spending bill riddled with pork, waste, and earmarks.

Imagine that? A Senator reveling in victory, a victory both his party and his voters were keen on winning. How “amateurish.”

Kirk, POLITICO reported, was “showboating for voters” but that “demeanor” soon “became a lesson in the perils of punching above your weight in a club in which methodically won stature is everything.” It was a “rookie mistake” POLITICO and the other more seasoned senators insisted.

Here is some of the reaction reported:

“I think his whole demeanor wasn’t that appropriate,” Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) told POLITICO after chiding Kirk on the Senate floor. “I saw what he said, and I thought, ‘I’m going to say something.’ And I thought that that was the politics that people are fed up with. So he has to be very careful.”

…Breaking from his party, Kirk voted to support the repeal of the ban on gays serving openly in the military. Kirk ended up in a heated exchange on the Senate floor with his mentor, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had made clear his disagreement with Kirk’s position, according to sources familiar with the conversation.

..Kirk has shown quickly that he can be a show horse, but in the Senate, the real test for Kirk will be to prove he’s a workhorse, able to cut deals across the aisle, according to one senior GOP aide who was taken aback by his remarks on the spending bill.

… Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who took him to task after his victory lap on the Senate floor, said she’s willing to give Kirk a second chance to make a first impression.

How nice. Senator McCaskil has deigned to “give” Kirk a second chance. Does she care that the voters of Illinois have spoken and that THEY are the ones giving Kirk his “chance”? Apparently that little bit of reality doesn’t intrude on her arrogant assumption that she is the one responsible for giving an elected senator from another state any “chances.”

Shocking, no? Shocking, yes. What is shocking is what this story reveals about the U.S. Senate. It reveals that the Senate is the problem in Washington, not the solution. These snooty, arrogant cusses are far more concerned with their status, their place and their position and with keeping those new to the game down than they are about actually doing their jobs. They are more interested in massaging their already bloated egos than in working for the betterment of the country.

But, I guess since our senators don’t actually want to do their jobs, they have to fill their time with something, don’t they? Since actually taking the time to learn about the issues and voting on them is not something this swelled-headed so-and-sos feel disposed to do, I guess playing high school-styled popularity games is the next best thing to fill their days. Everyone’s gotta do something, right?

So, yeah, it’s no wonder that all these important personages got a bit upset that the new guy in the block actually went out and helped achieve something his constituents wanted him to do. I mean, how annoying to find a junior, first year senator actually doing something without the other’s by-your-leave approval!

It’s all just so amateurish.

Now, me, I am happy to see Mark Kirk stick it in the faces of these do-nothing, ignoramuses. I was not the biggest Kirk fan in the world, but I most certainly have is back on this. Someone’s gotta shake up these placid, stuffy, arrogant cusses.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.