Case study of hypocrisy
The level of hypocrisy around here has reached its gentle level of sufficiency for me. We know why Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Merced, of no known political affiliation, is in office. We know who pays to keep him there: a cabal of special interests, including but not limited to finance, insurance and real estate and the University of California.
Cardoza offends in ways that sound like wounded children's cries in a Baghdad hospital.
First, this is a politician who refuses to acknowledge his ordinary constituents in public except at carefully staged political events. His staff says it is because he cherishes his privacy at home away from Washington. One could almost believe it but for what he does. He passed a measure for national foster children awareness. Who could vote against that? Then he makes sure that through the media his entire district knows he and his wife adopted two foster children. Cardoza is exploiting his own adopted children to demonstrate his alleged compassion. I don't want to know about his family. His family genuinely is his private business. After the Condit disaster, we don't want to know about our congressman's family life. It offends me as a parent and as a voter. I want the newspaper to tell me how he voted on the issues, which it very rarely does.
However, this creep called a reporter at the Stockton Record after his vote for the Iraq supplemental appropriations bill last week. The reporter put the conversation out on his blog. Cardoza is shown nearly crying on the guy's shoulder. And the reporter buys it. And the blogosphere goes wild over the posting, So now we have another source of gigalo media, a Stockton blog--what else? Another reporter pimping his access to a politician so full of it we haven't seen the whites of his eyes since the levee break in his state Assembly District in early 1997.
Granted there is a lot of agricultural pork in the bill along with preponderant military pork, which gets to the jackasses who own this man and his little chunk of the US Congress.
Between 1990 and 2005, Iraq has had a 150-percent increase is child mortality. Iraq has the worst mortality rate for children 5 and under in the world. How many US soldiers' children will be missing a parent by the end of this? How dare this wretched, corrupt little no-account rub his children in the public's face. This is a man who is missing an essential part of human personality. I am tired of this political rotting sound.
In other events in the fabulous career of our political celebrity, Cardoza recently introduced a bill to increase the sentence of public officials caught in scandals of a financial kind. The congressman intoned in a press release that corruption lowers the people's faith in government.
What crap! This bum was 100-percent in the corrupt orbit of former Rep. Richard Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy, until a year ago. And Jack "The Singing Lobbyist" Abramoff keeps staying out of jail on sheer musical ability. First Cunningham, then Pombo, now Doolittle. What's to say about Cardoza's junket to the Marianas? Perhaps, he's covered his ass with more junkets to Israel and Jack's turning cantor before the Almighty and federal judges. Cardoza and Pombo were so tight, local dairymen began calling them the Pomboza several years ago. It's not a nice word on some Azorean islands but how nice do you have to speak about a guy who ran lady mud-wrestling contests in his bowling alley?
Hypocrisy is the only vice that truly negates integrity. The lifelong psychological trauma of the killer - in war or in a knife fight in a hobo jungle by the railroad tracks- is that witness called conscience.
The hypocrite is so into his role it silences conscience. Cardoza is a man who is totally into being a political big shot. Anyone who has ever seen him operate in one of his staged events for the constituents knows this. Fine. Let him represent his special interests, take their money, drive wildlife species extinct, and just shut up about it. But Cardoza is too ambitious. He wants to appear virtuous at the same time. Whatever his true intentions are we doubt he, clever little Blue Dog Macchiavellian he thinks he is, has a clue about them. But his political deeds and speech smell like decayed fish bait.
We have a man representing us in Congress who is constantly lying to himself, which is to say a person who is rotten to the core, a defunct soul, nothing but another member of the empty suit mob. What the special interests of his district didn't take, Majority Leader and Pombo substitute, Steny Hoyer, got, because Cardoza always operates with a front guy more powerful than he is since Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg. He's only got one political tune. It's not that Cardoza politically disagrees with the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, D-SF. He probably doesn't understand her speech.
The Democratic Party has a history. No hypocrite Democrat can bear to grasp that history, mainly full of painful compromise and betrayal as well as better moments. Failing the integrity to confront the history of the Democratic Party, the hypocrite must betray the party over and over and over again, as if each betrayal were a baseball bat to the head of that history. The hypocrite must break the skull of conscience, which turns out to be his own skull. Incidently, he breaks the faces of the poor workers in his district. And how about them foreclosures on mortgages made while Cardoza was trying to gut the Endangered Species Act? In his ambitious quest for office and all that office implies, Cardoza has reduced himself to nothing at all -- suitable only for the handful of people who own him. The game is to keep the gigolo press and now its blog accessories from connecting the dots to make Zero.
For while probably no living man, in his capacity as an agent, can claim not only to be uncorrupted but to be incorruptible, the same may not be true with respect to this other watchful and testifying self before whose eyes not our motives and the darkness of our hearts but, at least, what we do and say must appear. -- Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, p. 103
Bill Hatch
---------------
5-7-07
Reuters
Egypt lauded, Iraq faulted in child deaths report
By Will Dunham
http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2007/05/08/egypt_lauded...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Egypt made the most progress among developing countries in cutting deaths of children under age 5 from 1990 to 2005 while Iraq deteriorated the most, a U.S.-based charity said in a report on Tuesday.
The humanitarian group Save the Children tracked child mortality trends in 60 developing countries during this period. Twenty either made no progress in reducing these deaths or had higher death rates.
These 60 countries accounted for 94 percent of child deaths worldwide, the report said. About 10.2 million children under age 5 die annually around the world -- 99 percent in developing nations amid poverty, disease and malnutrition -- with 28,000 deaths a day.
Nearly three-quarters of all such deaths were due to pneumonia, diarrhea and newborn disorders like premature birth, birth asphyxia and birth defects, the report said.
Deaths of children under 5 declined 68 percent in Egypt from 1990 to 2005, the report said. Iraq, gripped by war since a U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 and subjected to years of economic sanctions before that, had a 150 percent increase in child mortality, it added ...
----------------
5-25-07
Stockton Record
Cardoza: 'Why I voted yes'...Hank Shaw's Blog
http://blogs.recordnet.com/n/blogs/blog.aspx?webtag=sr-hshaw&redirCnt=1
Today's vote on funding for the War in Iraq highlighted the range of political thought on the issue right here in our own region: For Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, it was an easy "no" vote because there was no timetable for withdrawa... That leaves Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced. Cardoza was one of 82 Democrats to buck House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and push the green button. Cardoza says it wasn't easy. He called me after the vote to talk about it and sounded pretty down. "I've had better days,"...when I asked him how he was. Cardoza said he voted "aye" because he couldn't bear to leave the troops hanging, but said he felt like Congress had no other choice because it can't override a Bush veto and force a timetable on him. Yet. "We didn't have the votes in the Senate,"... I pointed out that the House (and the Senate) will often cast a vote knowing full well the other chamber won't play ball, so why not vote against the timetable-less bill? "Yeah, I know we've done that in the past,"..."But this is war. It's people's lives. It's a different deal. We could have cut off funding, but it would be chaos -- and I could not vote for chaos." Cardoza said he looks forward to another funding vote in September, another chance to judge for himself whether Bush's handling of the war is any different than chaos. "We're getting very close,"...Cardoza added that many of his Republican friends wanted to vote against the bill today but did not: Some out of loyalty to their president, others for similar reasons to Cardoza. He said that could change.
------
5-24-07
Cardoza to talk about foster care on 'The View'
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/13617276p-14214224c.html
Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, will appear on the ABC television program "The View" at 8 a.m. today to observe National Foster Care Month and discuss the foster care system.
Cardoza, recognized as a congressional leader on foster care issues, adopted two foster children seven years ago, and has advocated on behalf of adoption and foster children in the California Assembly and in Congress...
-------
5-24-07
http://www.house.gov/list/press/ca18_cardoza/Sentencing_Amend.html
News From…
Congressman Dennis Cardoza
18th Congressional District of California
Rep. Cardoza Hails Passage of his Amendment to Strengthen Penalties for Ethics Violations by Public Officials
Amendment Passed with Unanimous Consent as part of Lobbying Reform Bill
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 24, 2007 CONTACT: Jamie McInerney
(202) 225-6131
WASHINGTON – Today Congressman Dennis Cardoza introduced and passed an amendment that would double prison sentences, up to a two year increase, for elected and appointed public officials who violate the public trust. The amendment allows judges to increase the sentences when public officials are convicted of bribery, fraud, extortion, or theft in the course of their official duties.
“With public faith in government officials weakened by scandals from the Jack Abramhoff affair to the Duke Cunningham conviction, we need to ensure that those who break these laws are punished appropriately,” said Cardoza. “Beyond breaking the law, the perpetrators of these crimes violate the “public trust” by defying their fiduciary responsibility to the Constitution and to the people of America. I hope that this amendment will act as a deterrent to illegal behavior in the future and help rebuild public trust in government officials.”
The amendment passed unanimously as part of HR 2316, the Honest Leadership and Open Government of 2007, which contains landmark lobbying reforms that will cleanup the way business is done in Washington. Strengthening ethics rules and accountability of public officials is a longstanding interest of Congressman Cardoza. Cardoza introduced stand alone legislation similar to this amendment in the 109th and 110th sessions of Congress.
5-28-07
Merced Sun Star
Pork barrel spending...Maria Mendoza, Modesto...Letters to the editor
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/opinion/story/13630182p-14225940c.html
I thought Congressman Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, was a fiscal conservative?...seriously disheartened to see how he is using his new position on the powerful House Rules Committee and as a chairman of an Agriculture Committee...disappointed to learn that the Iraq Accountability Act was stuffed with pork barrel spending -- mostly from agriculture...this was the Iraq spending bill to support our soldiers. Ironically, most of the members of the "Blue Dog" Democrats who are supposed to be fiscal conservatives voted for the "Iraq" spending bill. Most Democrats campaigned on fiscal responsibility and to cut the pork. Yet only seven of the 43 Blue Dogs that support a strong national security and fiscal responsibility voted against the bill. Some members of Congress have referred to this most recent use of pork barrel spending as political bribery; others call them "sweeteners." It appears that Congressman Cardoza, the communications director of the Blue Dog Coalition, representing the second largest dairy district in the nation, has reaped the benefits of delivering the votes of the Blue Dogs to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It truly appalls me that Cardoza has used his new position to be hypocritical to his fiscal conservative stand in exchange for power. I thought he was different. Welcome to Washington.