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Jon Stewart Rips Paul Ryan and House Republicans for Voting Against Sandy Aid

By: Jason EasleyJan. 8th, 2013more from Jason Easley

Jon Stewart ripped the 67 House Republicans who voted no on flood insurance funding for Sandy victims, and exposed the hypocrisy behind their ideology.

Here is the video from The Daily Show:

After dismantling Paul Ryan’s bogus reason for voting no on the bill, Jon Stewart had a message for House Republicans,

By the way, you can’t just change the rules of the game in the middle of a disaster. The deal is, if your part of the country gets shellacked by a disaster, we all kick in a couple of shekels. You want to change that deal? Vote on it when people can’t build sandcastles in their living rooms. The truth of the matter is this whole principled ideology thing that you are putting out there is bulls**t anyway.

Exhibit A: Mississippi’s honorable Steven Palazzo…Palazzo is the guy who just last year was asking for, you guessed it, funding for the National Flood Insurance Program for a storm that took place in his area over seven years ago.

(Video of Palazzo asking for more flood insurance money last year.)

Oh, the flood insurance program you vetoed to reimburse? Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s pretend that instead of your constituents in Mississippi, it’s someone else’s constituents in New York, and instead of seven years later, it’s two months later, and instead of a baseline temperature of sixty degrees, it’s f**king freezing, and instead of being an assh**e, you weren’t. Look Republicans, I get that you are the party of limited government. But we’re not talking about Obamacare here, this was two paragraphs giving aid to people in need and you guys still couldn’t bring yourselves to vote for it, because of some stupid principle that you yourselves only occasionally live by. And here’s thing, if you guys can’t vote for this then we’re f**ked for the next two years. And I’m not saying you’re responsible for all the problems in our country, but you sure are making them a lot harder to fix.

Jon Stewart was discussing the concept of our obligation as a society to help people who find themselves in need through no fault of their own. The vote to give additional borrowing authority to the National Flood Insurance Program had nothing to do with disaster relief. It was about allowing the program and by extension our society to meet our obligations.

After this website published the initial story about the 67 House Republicans who tried to rip off Sandy victims, Republicans claimed that the bill was full of pork, and that the full story was not being told. As Stewart pointed out, there was no pork in the bill. The disaster relief bill and the flood insurance bill are two different pieces of legislation. Paul Ryan and his defenders continue to flat out lie, and invent justifications for their opposition to the bill.

Bernie Sanders recently got to the heart of what this current debate is really about. Whether the issue is the deficit, taxes, or disaster relief, the root disagreement is the same. Republicans are arguing that our societal obligation is to the wealthiest Americans. They are rejecting the idea that our society has an obligation to those who lose their jobs through a recession, or can’t work due to age or disability, or lose everything because of a natural disaster.

House Republicans are telling the American people that unless you’re rich, you’re on your own. It is this philosophical belief grounded in extreme conservatism that outraged Jon Stewart.

Jon Stewart and millions of Americans are realizing that House Republicans aren’t just out of step with the will of the people. They are also out of step with basic compassion and humanity.

Jon Stewart Rips Paul Ryan and House Republicans for Voting Against Sandy Aid was written by Jason Easley for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Jan. 8th, 2013. All Rights Reserved

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