Louisiana State Representative Revealed to be Pure Evil

When I sat down to scope out the news this morning, I was really only looking for stories about the debate that is hopefully going to take place tonight, and about the fight in Congress over the $700 billion bailout proposal. By chance, I happened to notice something else entirely, something so preposterous that I think it bears mentioning instead of another angry rant about McCain.

This story broke on Tuesday, 9/23, but CNN just posted an excellent clip this morning (video). Kyra Phillips interviews Louisiana State Representative John LaBruzzo (R), whose office proposed legislation that would pay poor women $1000 to get their tubes tied. The idea, see, is that poor women make poor babies. That's basically all they do all day. It's not like they have jobs or anything. Ergo, if you give every poor woman a thousand dollars to get her tubes tied, not only are the women marginally less poor, but they'll stop spitting out young'ns like the genetic chain guns they are.

If you watch the whole video, you'll notice a few things. First, that Kyra Phillips has more balls than most of the mainstream press. She lets LaBruzzo ramble on for a while at the beginning, but then she puts him on the spot and doesn't let up. It's awesome. Second, for someone so concerned with children draining the state's economy through generational welfare, LaBruzzo doesn't seem particularly familiar with the facts. I really love the part where Phillips asks LaBruzzo what he makes of the fact that the poverty rate for adults with kids is actually significantly lower than the poverty rate for adults who are childless. (17% compared to 23% in the 2006-2007 census). He fobs it off, saying he's a State Representative, and not concerned with national statistics. Then she points out that these percentages are from Louisiana. That really gave me a warm feeling.

You might also notice that LaBruzzo never answers the first question in the clip, which was basically designed to give him an easy out. Phillips asks who else was involved in coming up with this monstrous idea. LaBruzzo has the opportunity to spread the blame around, to say, "It's not that I'm hugely evil, it's that a large number of people are each a little bit evil." To his credit, he doesn't. Alternately, he could have tried to pass the whole thing off as a joke that arose out of tiredness and frustration after a long brainstorming session. We've all been there. It's two in the morning, the coffee ran out six hours ago, everyone's exhausted, someone half-heartedly throws out the idea that they can solve this welfare thing by just purging the cancerous species known as the poor, everyone chuckles weakly, and that's when they decide to call it a night. Again, they'd all look a little evil, but it could be forgiven. LaBruzzo almost tries this tactic a couple times, by mentioning that they brainstormed many ideas, and this whole forced sterilization thing was just one of them. He blames the media for latching onto this one idea.

Well, yeah.

But LaBruzzo never truly passes the buck. He doesn't pin this on his staff, or on an advisor who has since been fired. He doesn't even try to blame it on some sort of magic spell cast by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, who once held LaBruzzo's seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. That's what I would have done, but then, I've always had a penchant for working wizardry into my conversations with the press. No, instead of passing the blame, or indeed, answering the question, LaBruzzo goes on a two minute rant about how poor people are lazy.

Poor people, he says, relied on the government for help during the evacuations that occurred in response to the hurricanes that have ravaged that area. Yeah, stupid fucking poor people. You know, I generally like to think that I understand the Republicans' desire for a smaller government. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I understand it. But what I don't get is wanting a federal government that is so small and powerless that it isn't even responsible for helping its own citizens in the event of a horrific natural disaster. That's beyond me, but not as far beyond me as what LaBruzzo says next. I'll let him speak for himself.

"With the seven hundred billion dollar bailout, I think the taxpayers of America are kinda getting fed up and saying, 'Look, we need people to go to work and help pull the wagon instead of generation after generation jumping into the wagon.'"

Just as a reminder, that was in answer to the question, "Paying a woman a thousand dollars to tie her tubes - was this your idea, and who else was involved in this brainstorming session?"

Holy shit. Is "LaBruzzo" Italian for "Skeletor?" How do you even get that sort of thought process without being totally, 100% evil? Wall St. collapses due to greed and shoddy investment practices in the housing market, so taxpayers nationwide should be fed up with women living in poverty in Louisiana? And then the solution is to charge taxpayers more in order to pay every woman below the poverty line $1000 to get their tubes tied? Not to mention that tubes don't magically tie themselves. Not even a Grand Wizard has that kind of power, and they're grand. We'll need doctors to perform these procedures; doctors who could otherwise be using their time to help people with medical conditions that don't have anything to do with their bank accounts. God knows, if there's one thing the state of Louisiana needs, it's fewer doctors with time to devote to helping people who really need it.

Obviously, LaBruzzo's malevolent idea is never going to become actual legislation. He's never going to even draft it. That's not the issue, here. The issue is just how frighteningly out of touch Republican leaders seem to be from the people they supposedly represent (House of Representatives, get it?). Our housing market is in shambles, but John McCain can't even remember how many houses he owns. John LaBruzzo has no problem with charging taxpayers for a $700 billion bailout with no oversight designed to keep Wall Street CEOs from having to sell their private jets, but he proposed sterilizing the poor. And just the ladies. The dudes, after all, might actually make something of themselves one day. Maybe they'll marry a wealthy woman after impressing her with their awe-inspiring, government-approved fertility. And while LaBruzzo does admit that this is perhaps not the best solution to the problem, he is not ashamed of it, or embarrassed by it, or horrified that this idea that was only proposed as a sick joke to be kept amongst friends somehow got out to the press. No, he stands by it. He defends it, and says that it's still on the table. And yet, Democrats are the ones accused of being elitist.