UPDATED:
Apparently bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with tax-payer money, are not only common but expected.
Ed Morrissey compiles the list of pay-offs to get to 60.
Tom Harkin dismissed such bribes as "small stuff".
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, responded Tuesday to widespread criticism that Democrats only garnered the 60 votes needed to defeat Republican stalling tactics on the health reform bill by catering to self-interest, saying Democrats are focusing on the big picture; "trying to cross a demarcation line."
Harkin dismissed deals dubbed vote-buying by GOP senators as "small stuff" that distracted Americans from the primary focus of the overhaul bill.
"We have to keep our eyes on what we're trying to do here. We're trying to cross a demarcation line," Harkin told "Early Show" co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez. "On one side is health care as a privilege, on the other side is health care as a right. With these votes, with the vote that we'll take before Christmas, we will cross that line finally and say that health care is a right of all Americans."
And Dingy Harry goes further and mocks those that didn't line up at the trough:
“There are 100 senators here and I don’t know that there’s a senator that doesn’t have something in this bill that isn’t important to them,” Reid said. “If they don’t have something in it important to them then it doesn’t speak well of them.”
He likened the legislation to the defense bill, which is thick with earmarks and other provisions benefitting individual members and even private corporations.
But this is impossible. I promised during the campaign that the era of earmarks and special interests is over! That I would go through bills line by line to cut out the waste! That I would bring change to Washington!
ReplyDeleteI, Obama