Political Irony

Who is Grover Norquist, you might ask? Well, find out because he is destroying your Congress, your country and the Republican Party

©Bob Englehart

What do you call a person who vociferously hates our government and works tirelessly to destroy our government? A traitor? Perhaps. What if he also would defund the military, police and fire departments? An anarchist? No, he’s a conservative icon and one of the most influential political figures in America. He’s Grover Norquist, grand doyen of the anti-tax pledge ubiquitous on the Republican aisles of Congress.

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, an organization promoting higher taxes on themselves, is now confronting Norquist head on:

[Norquist] raised an issue we get all the time which is, ‘Well there’s nothing stopping you guys from paying higher taxes, just send a check to the government!’ And this to me is frankly an absurd position; I don’t consider it to be a very serious argument. Government is not a charity and we can’t rely on voluntary contributions from people to support the things that government does. And I also said to him, ‘Look would you be willing to sign a pledge where you’re willing to forgo all the benefits that government provides? Are you willing to sign a pledge that says you don’t want the U.S. military to protect you? That you will refuse to contact the police if somebody steals from you? That you will refuse to contact the fire department if your house is on fire? Because that’s the equivalent! Why should you get a free ride? Why should you benefit from my willingness to support the government? Let’s do it together.’ And he said, ‘If I don’t have to pay any taxes for it, I would forgo all those things!’ To which my response was, ‘Well there’s an easy way to do that, move to Somalia!’ And his argument was, ‘Somalia doesn’t suffer from too little government, it suffers from too much government.’ I don’t even begin to understand what that means, but again there’s only so much you can go into in these conversations.

Thom Hartmann’s blog points out the overwhelming evidence that Norquist hyperbole is basically anarchist:

There is evidence of Norquist attempting to defund our government into bankrupcy. There are government records, interviews, articles, and books by Norquist that implicate him as an anarchist out to destroy America as we know it. He imfamously announced during a NPR interview (May 25, 2001) what his anti-government movement was planning, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years,” he says, “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

Ironically, many Republicans are very upset about the small number of naive, youthful anarchists complicating the Occupy Movement yet worship at the feet of a truly dangerous anarchist in their midst.
– Iron Filing