This story about Republican gubernatorial candidate Mary Fallin’s campaign scheduling is a sad little snapshot of how twisted conservative politics have become in recent years. Fallin, the representative for Oklahoma City’s district, petulantly refused initially to return for the emergency congressional session called to pass legislation giving money to the states to relieve their outrageous budget woes . Her reasoning wasn’t that her presence couldn’t do enough for Oklahoma. Actually standing up for your constituents is just so old-school! Her reasoning was that the funding to help her state wasn’t something she could stop, so she would just skip the vote and sadly watch money roll in to her state to stave off further budget crisis.
However, she did return to the session, not to stand up for Oklahoma in this time of crisis, but in order to make sure that she got to vote for a bill that amounts to anti-immigrant grandstanding. Even though many cities across the country are turning off lights and cutting employment rolls due to budget shortfalls, Congress felt they should spare $600 million to add agents and unmanned drones to the border. This, despite the fact that immigration has fallen sharply , in part because no one wants to move to a country that has embraced its downward decline so spectacularly that we’re literally unpaving our roads .
This is how topsy-turvy politics have become due to right wing demagoguery-a candidate who campaigns not just on her stalwart resistance to lifting a finger to help out the state she wishes to run, but also on her willingness to make sure the money not being spent on roads and lights is instead fighting a supposed problem that’s going away on its own. If Fallin were an actual mama grizzly, she’d be letting her cubs be eaten by predators while she ran off to fight a pine tree.
Photograph of Mary Fallin by Alex Wong/Getty Images News.
