-By Warner Todd Huston
During a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Chairman Darrell Issa used an old saying to describe committee member and ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings and despite that Cummings averred that he understood the comment and took no offense, but making a mountain out of a mole hill, Politico reported the incident as a “controversy.”
On July 18, Issa noted that Cummings was like “a little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar,” an old saying that describes someone that got caught taking something or being somewhere he shouldn’t. It is not a race-based saying.
“I’m always shocked when the ranking member seems to want to say, like a little boy whose hand has been caught in a cookie jar, ‘What hand? What cookie?’ I’ve never said it leads to the White House,” Issa said during the hearing.
Hours later, Issa felt compelled to make sure everyone knew that his comment had no racial component to it.
“I want to make sure I make something very clear: When I referred to my ranking member … I took a shortcut in how I expressed it, and I want to make it very clear: that when I talk about the ‘little boy putting his hand in the cookie jar’ … that is something that I grew up with, and it is intended to be about a small child and in no way is the use of ‘boy’ or ‘little boy’ to mean anything else,” Chairman Issa said.
Representative Cummings said he understood full well what was meant the first time around and took no offense.
“Thank you very much Mr. Chairman; I really do appreciate your words, and of course they were taken out of context and twisted, or whatever, I do appreciate [the clarification], and I know you mean that,” Cummings said.
To recap, Issa used an old, non-racial saying, Cummings took no offense, but Politico tried to create a controversy anyway.
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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, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.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.
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