My Congressman and I are not simpatico. We are so not simpatico that I suspect Hell would freeze solid, not just over, before we were on the same page. I would not mind his disagreeing with me so much if he showed the least ability to a) think, b) learn, c) understand what someone who doesn't agree with him meant by what they said, d) if he didn't try to be chummy (and condescending with it) and e) if he and his elephantine party were capable of taking responsibility for the consequences of their own actions. Oh yeah--and f) if he wouldn't whine like a spoiled toddler. Privileged adults should not whine. Grump, growl, snarl, shout occasionally, but not...ever...whine. I don't tolerate whining from children; I should not be subjected to it by my Congresscritter.
In the years this fellow has been my Congresscritter, he has never once showed any individual capacity for thought. He's a very loyal elephantine parrot, blithely ignoring reality as he spouts the same old (obviously false) doctrine. For the first few exchanges between us, he tried completely ignoring what I said and just replying with the latest sound bite from the Party leaders. I pointed out (more than once) that this was not responsive. Now he more or less responds, but not directly to what I said...touching it tangentially and then going off with another barrage of cliche sound bites bragging on his Party and himself.
I would think he was just terminally stupid, except he has a law degree, and even in Texas it's hard to get a law degree if your IQ is as low as his seems. That leaves me wondering if he's just incredibly gullible (can he really believe this stuff? After all the evidence that it's wrong?) or if he's deliberately spouting what he knows to be false (i.e., lying?) Clearly, from the current set of responses, he knows zilch about the real state of Americans and the misnamed "health care system." He's spouting non-facts as facts; he doesn't know (apparently) how to tell good evidence and statistics from bad, or what the real metrics of health care are.
The for-profit health insurance industry is spending upwards of a million and a half dollars a day--yes, a day--lobbying Congress to preserve their very large cut of the health care budget pie. These are the people who are spending a smaller percentage of insurance premiums received on health care itself...who have caused employers to fire someone whose medical needs "cost too much" or lose health care for the whole shop...who have raised premiums so high that most people cannot afford individual insurance, while cutting benefits to those who need care. (If you are not aware that insurance companies ration health care and mandate cheap--and sometimes ineffective--treatments, you should be. Many patients are very aware of it.) My Congressman clearly believes everything the insurance companies tell him...and since they're spending a lot of money to convince him, I'm sure they're pleased. I'm not.
I need to shorten my letter to him, because this man doesn't read well (odd, since he was a lawyer and then a judge) and won't like what I'm saying, which affects his reading ability even more. It's too bad. I have some lovely phrases in there, some nice rolling periods worthy of the cause. I mean, he laid himself open to it--he was so ineffably, ineluctably wrong in fact and logic, that deconstructing his response was--though it took hours to do it properly--almost fun. Only almost, because this clown has real power, there in Congress. And it's clear that he will never think, never learn to think, never for a moment consider that he might be wrong, never for a moment grasp what "evidence" is in the real world and learn to examine it and come to sound conclusions.
He is so dense--his head so solidly heavy-metallic-- that if you dropped him into the ocean, he'd fall headfirst all the way down and stick in the seafloor. From which position he'd continue to poison the waters.
(No, of course I didn't vote for him. Don't be silly. It's true I didn't know how bad he would be until a few months into his first term.)