Question: Which institution has continued to function normally since the HIPPO revolution six years ago–Congress or the Kansas Legislature? Answer: None of the above. Not since the HIPPOs pushed the RINOS out of the GOP.
Our U.S. representative Tim Huelskamp says he is proud to be one of 30 or 40 ?Freedom Caucus? members who have abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Backed mostly by secretive big money interests, this group of rebels without a clue ?see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries,? columnist David Brooks writes.
Indeed, they are.
?This new Republican faction regards the messy business of politics as soiled and impure,? Brooks wrote. ?Compromise is corruption. Inconvenient facts are ignored. Countrymen with different views are regarded as aliens. Political identity (becomes) a sort of ethnic identity, and any compromise (is) regarded as a blood betrayal.?
As a result they are, as with all revolutionaries, ?incompetent at governing and unwilling to be governed.? Their track record bears that out:
In Kansas, they?ve virtually taken over and put the state into a financial tailspin with no plan for the looming 2016 budget crisis. In Congress, there are about 40 of them, enough apparently, to decapitate the House and tip it into chaos and dysfunction.
These are the HIPPOs — Hypocritical Ignorant Paranoid Partisan Obstructionist Scolds.
?HIPPO? fits them. Big mouth, tiny ears, no frontal lobe to the brain, and loves mud.
They?ve not delivered on a single promise to voters but have single-mindedly and fruitlessly focused on enhancing their own power in the Congress, at the expense of the citizens? business.
They?ve driven out House leadership. Now Paul Ryan says he’ll take the post if the Caucus members grow up and ten members of the caucus are still balking (Rep. Huelskamp being one). The Hippopotami can’t even get along with each other.
The HIPPOS in the Kansas legislature have cut taxes for wealthier Kansans, cut services to poor and disabled, driven teachers out of the state, wrecked Kansas? credit rating costing taxpayers unseen millions, drained the highway fund and turned down nearly $800 million in federal Medicaid money so far putting Kansas poor and many of our rural hospitals at risk. And there is still no plan for the looming 2016 budget crisis.
Until someone can remind us what exactly was wrong with governance by RINO?s, we?ll continue to miss them.
–Ned Valentine, Clay Center Dispatch
