If the GOP wants to alienate every person in the USA because they are obstructionists and cause hardship for those they decide they can dominate either socially or financially of both, that is fine, but, don't expect the victimized to vote in favor of the deniers.
In a statement widely taken as a metaphor, (click title to entry - thank you) the chairman of the Republican National Committee on Thursday said his party is no more trying to hurt the nation's females than it is larval butterflies and moths.
"If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we'd have problems with caterpillars," Reince Priebus told Bloomberg Television. "It's a fiction."
But the war on caterpillars and other innocent insects, it turns out, is not a fiction at all.
Under the guise of aiding the agriculture industry, Republicans and their allies in Washington have been waging a long-running campaign to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from limiting bug-killing pesticides. Last year, GOP Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas authored a letter, signed by several others in his party, calling on Democrats to "address the continued regulatory overreach by the Environmental Protection Agency that is a growing concern of farmers, ranchers, foresters and agribusinesses throughout the nation" by bringing up their bill to ease pesticide regulations. This obvious attempt to run roughshod over the rights of many-legged herbivores everywhere was laughably justified as a matter of "public health as we enter mosquito season."
In a similar gesture of outrageous insensitivity to the feelings of Creepy-Crawly-Americans, some conservatives also want to get the controversial insecticide DDT unbanned by the EPA. The free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute runs a website, RachelWasWrong.org, devoted to beating the drum for bringing back DDT, whose banning it terms the "dangerous legacy" of Rachel Carson'sSilent Spring. But for the liberals and their "tree-hugging political correctness," one NewsMax commentator wrote, bedbugs -- largely voiceless in this whole debate -- might be eradicated.
Republicans may claim that they have no anti-caterpillar agenda -- that they're just trying to protect people and plants from being bitten, that they're merely the victims of a liberal media that sympathizes with the radical bugs'-rights lobby. But the truth is clear, and it's nothing new: Republicans just don't care about caterpillars.
Need any more proof? Tom DeLay, the onetime leader of the GOP House majority, began his career as an exterminator.
