Sometimes you don’t want to get what you wish for. That line originated in either a fairy tale, a fortune cookie or a country-western song. I forget where it came from, but it’s true as can be. For example, we left-wing, liberal, pinko fags at City Weekly have long wished that Sen. Orrin Hatch would just go away, or at the least, that the national press would quit propping him up. Wearing swell ties and giving good quotes should not be recipe enough for Senate superstardom. Then lo and behold, Vermont’s Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party to become an Independent. Power in the Senate switched to the Democrats and Hatch found himself far less influential. It appeared our wish had come true.
Hatch noted that God favors Republicans, and if his losing his Senate power was the way God wants it, then fine with him. Those words redefined yet another adage, “God works in mysterious ways.” For now, in place of the obsequious Hatch as Utah’s highest-ranking member of Congress, we have the paradoxical Congressman Jim Hansen. Oh, he’s not a paradox in and of himself—it’s plain as day that he’s a simple guy, possessed of a simple vocabulary and perhaps average intelligence, who like Hatch, finds Biblical links to justify his very being and his decision-making. Lots of windbags are like that. What’s paradoxical is that Hansen has won his district about 85 times by landslide margins. His district is home to four universities. Who said universities were hotbeds of liberal intellect, anyway?
Jim Hansen, as sly as Br’er Rabbit ever was, recently found himself at the epicenter of the debate regarding the continued use of Vieques Island as a bombing training ground for the United States Navy and Marines. Speaking in his ever-eloquent, laid back, ‘aw shucks’ Utah speak, Hansen intoned, “they [Puerto Ricans] sit down there on welfare and, very few of them paying taxes, got a sweetheart deal. I just don’t really see the equity in it, but maybe I don’t understand it.” That line made Hansen both friends and enemies. And in politics, who could ask for more?
Naturally, it was quickly pointed out that in his very own district there are plenty of welfare hos, so what’s the big deal about welfare in Puerto Rico? Hansen knew that besides Puerto Ricans, only “a few Hollywood actors and a handful of protestors” even remotely care about Vieques. Hansen thus made his hos feel good about being more deserving and more patriotic than Puerto Rican hos. So what if some Viequans are dying of weird cancers? That, friends is the price of freedom. Just ask Jim.
