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What made the GOP response more of an embarrassment, beyond hollow faux-conservative sloganeering, was McMorris Rodger's barking delivery

McMorris Rodgers' GOP SOTU response a lame, lazy waste of time



President Barack Obama's State of the Union address was a dreary exercise, but it was not nearly as dreary as the Republican response to his address by Washington State's Rep. Catherine McMorris Rogers.
Rogers is the chairwoman of the Republican Policy Committee, the fourth-ranking GOP leader in the House of Representative. Her role as the official responder was not to deliver or offer a policy or even a political alternative to the president. Her role was to eat up 10 minutes with heartwarming stories of about her family and rehash her old stage act as a Republican woman. There was no mention of IRS targeting of Tea Party groups and conservative advocates. There was no mention of the president laying the wood to Catholics and their institutions like Notre Dame University and the Little Sisters of the Poor, so that they financially support abortion coverage. What we do know is that she used to sell apples‚--presumably those Washington State apples I hate. She was the first member of her family to go to college. She married a retired Navy officer and one of their three children has a serious learning handicap that he is overcoming.

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What else? Oh, how about this jewel: "The President said many things tonight. But now, we ask him to listen--to you--for the true state of the union lies in your heart and in your home." Wow. The GOP really, really has no interest in fighting Obama, do they? What about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? Obamacare is easily one of the least popular products of this dreary regime, but McMorris Rodgers does not want to defund it. Her weasel quote was: "No, we shouldn't go back to the way things were, but this law is not working." What was wrong with the way things were before? Did not this woman vote to repeal Obamacare, like 60 or 70 times? What about granting amnesty to illegal aliens? Certainly in a country with hundreds of thousands of unemployed college graduates drowning in hundreds of thousands of dollars of college loan debt, are we really going to wave in 12 million illegals? Forget the stress on public schools and hospitals, what about the young engineers, lawyers and software designers about to be supplanted by young professionals from India, China and wherever? The conservative position is to secure the borders, and then set it up, so that our economy grows enough to create jobs for our unemployed, and only then opening up the line for foreigners. The pure conservative position is to have more open immigration, but the rationale conservative recognizes that the federal government facilitated huge student debt, we cannot ignore what will happen when we open up the doors to their cheaper competitors.

The Republican leadership is working for the president's agenda

McMorris Rodgers supports the president's bill, so she tells America: "It's time to honor our history of legal immigration. We're working on a step-by-step solution to immigration reform by first securing our borders and making sure America will always attract the best, brightest, and hardest working from around the world." Translation: The Republican leadership is working for the president's agenda. How about this pap: "The chance to go from my Washington to this one was unexpected. I came to Congress to help empower people, not politicians; to grow the working middle class, not the government; And to ensure that everyone in this country can find a job. Because a job is so much more than just a paycheck--It gives us purpose, dignity, and the foundation to build a future." What made the GOP response more of an embarrassment, beyond hollow faux-conservative sloganeering, was McMorris Rodger's barking delivery. Maybe after the debacle we saw last year, when Sen. Marco Rubio (R.-Fla.) literally put up a finger as if he put the live broadcast on pause, then duck down to swing a bottle of water, McMorris Rodgers' must have been told to just read her lines and get out.


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Neil W. McCabe -- Bio and Archives

Neil W. McCabe is the editor of Human Event’s “Guns & Patriots” e-letter and was a senior reporter at the Human Events newspaper. McCabe deployed with the Army Reserve to Iraq for 15 months as a combat historian. For many years, he was a reporter and photographer for “The Pilot,” Boston’s Catholic paper. He was also the editor of two free community papers, “The Somerville (Mass.) News and “The Alewife (North Cambridge, Mass.).”


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