Friday, August 26, 2011

A lame Chris Gibson town hall gets noticed nationally

From Daily Kos:


A lame Chris Gibson town hall gets noticed nationally
by devtob


Tea party Republican Chris Gibson, NY-20, has voted to end Medicare, against a clean debt ceiling bill, and signed the Grover Norquist anti-tax pledge.

Gibson was challenged about his disappointing record as a Boehner/Cantor parrot at a town hall in Millerton, Dutchess County, and a YouTube from that got national notice from Atrios.



Gibson repeated his Boehner/Cantor talking points and used a Boehner/Cantor PowerPoint to try to bamboozle his constituents.
But it didn't work.
Details, below.

Town halls everywhere are different from two years ago -- far fewer angry tea partiers, far more constituents concerned about radical Republican over-reach.
The video above was obviously edited by Gibson opponents, but still, it was remarkable in a couple of ways.
First, the sharp question about Gibson and Grover Norquist:
Why did you sign the Grover Norquist tax pledge?
snip
You didn't sign this on my behalf, you didn't ask me. We are your constituents, not Grover Norquist.
(Loud applause)
Alan Simpson wants to know who is Grover Norquist the slave of. By association, I would like to know who are you the slave of.
Gibson's reply is not on the video, though one can assume he did not admit to being a tax policy slave of Norquist.
Second, and more interesting, a small business owner in Millerton was no fan of the Gibson-abetted debt-ceiling hostage crisis, and let Gibson know it:
In January, a consortium of five of us got together to save a small business here in Millerton that was 24 small businesses. It took an awful lot of compromise to pull that off, a lot of folks in town that had influence with the man that owned the building went to bat for us, and a lot of us that were in the businesses had to make some cuts in order to make it work.
Since then, we've got it up and running. July was our best month ever, until you guys pulled your (debt ceiling) shenanigans, and our business has dropped probably 80 percent since then.
Everything you've said with this (Boehner/Cantor) chart, I think most people would agree with -- yes, we're spending too much money; yes, we need to reform taxes.
But don't close your mind, which you seem to have done, against raising taxes for the people who can best pay them.
Gibson lamely responded that he was in favor of vague "tax reform"; he didn't mention, on this YouTube, that he had voted for "tax reform" that would dramatically cut rates for the rich and corporations in the Ryan budget.
To his credit, Gibson at least holds town halls without charging admission, screening out Democrats, or confiscating cameras.
Therefore he has had to deal with constituents who see through the BS Boehner/Cantor talking points and PowerPoint charts.
The essential fact is that Gibson and the radical Republicans don't care about their constituents -- all they really care about is reducing taxes for millionaires and billionaires and doing their utmost to wreck the economy, for partisan political purposes.
The radical Republicans' relentless focus on comforting the comfortable may help a few hundred people in NY-20, but the vast majority of Gibson's constituents have been, and will be, screwed by their radical Republican Congressman.
More and more of them are catching on to that.



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