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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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...FROM CONGRESS?  REP. ALAN GRAYSON (D-Fla....maybe not a hero to the GOP, though. |
And Suddenly, A Star
Emerges from Left Field
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
Suddenly last week there was joy in the aggrieved left-wing Mudvilles of the land. A congressman from Florida named Alan Grayson got up on the floor of the House of Representatives and delivered a blistering, humorous attack on the Republicans. A hero was born to just about every American to the left of Barack Obama.
Grayson noted that many Republicans had waved papers at President Obama during his health reform speech. Grayson said he had figured out that the Republicans were waving their own health care plan, and that he had it.
He said, “If you get sick in America, this is the Republican health plan:” He turned over a sign that read, “The Republican health plan is 1. Don’t Get Sick.” “And if you do get sick,” he said, “their answer is (and he revealed this sign): ‘2. Die quickly.’ ”
Republicans demanded an apology from Grayson, just as Joe Wilson was forced to grovel for his “you lie” outburst against Obama. Grayson agreed in his fashion.
He said, “I would apologize to the dead. To the 44,789 Americans who die every year because they have no health insurance…I will apologize to their families that we haven’t ended this holocaust in America.”
In the face of acclaim from the left and fury from the right, Grayson came back with salvos at the Republicans and the Democrats. To the Democrats he said, “We as a party have spent the last six months, the greatest minds in our party, dwelling on the question, the unbelievably consuming question of how to get Olympia Snowe to vote on health care reform. I want to remind us all that Olympia Snowe was not elected President last year. Olympia Snowe has no veto power in the Senate. Olympia Snowe represents a state with one half of one percent of America’s population.”
Of the Republicans--the “no mongers” he called them--he said that the American public “understands that if Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world, the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation…..if Obama could somehow bring about world peace, they would blame him for destroying the defense industry….if Obama had a BLT sandwich, they would try to ban bacon.”
When I read this, which didn’t get much coverage in the public prints--not in the NY Times the next day--I wondered, “Who is this guy?”
With the help of my crack staff--Google and Wikipedia--I zeroed in on Alan Grayson.
He is the first-term congressman from the 8th district of Florida--the Orlando, Ocala precincts. He is originally from The Bronx. He grew up in the projects, was a star student at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. At Harvard he cleaned toilets and worked as a night watchman. He was a three-year summa cum laude graduate, a Harvard Law School graduate and also got a PhD in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He wrote his masters thesis on gerontology and founded the Alliance for Aging Research.
He is 51, six feet-four, Jewish and he is rich. He is the 12th richest legislator in Congress, with a net worth of $31.12 million, having made money as the head of IDT Corporation, a publicly-traded billion dollar telecommunications company. He is married to a Filipino woman. They have five children. He is so hot right now, he was unavailable to this scrivener so I couldn’t ask him how he came to name his children, Skye, Star, Sage, and the twins, Storm and Stone.
He was a law clerk for Judges Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Abner Mikva (on the relative left) and Robert Bork and Anthony Scalia (on the very right). As a lawyer, he won big money settlements, championing whistle blowers against alleged war profiteering companies in Iraq. He was featured in an eight-page Vanity Fair expose of war profiteering. At House Financial Service Commission hearings he pressed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke about half-a-trillion dollars loaned to foreign banks.
He doesn’t back off confrontations with Republicans. He called them “nattering nabobs of negativeism" (taking a leaf from Spiro Agnew speech writer William Safire). He also said they were “foot-dragging knuckle-scraping Neanderthals” And he called their assaults on his health care burlesque “hissy fits.” Rush Limbaugh? “A has-been hypocrite loser.”
He is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus along with Vermont’s independent socialist, Bernie Sanders. For his 2008 successful election campaign he hired an advertising man, Bill Hillsman, who had worked for Paul Wellstone and Ned Lamont [who challenged Joseph Lieberman] as well as Jesse Ventura and Ralph Nader in 2000.
Grayson questions our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. At hearings he said, “I think the aid program is a fig leaf trying to make Congress and the American people feel better about the war. And the idea that we could transform that society or any society through aid, I think, is entirely questionable…Everywhere you go people want to be left alone. And that’s the best foreign policy of all. Just leave people alone.”
When I was a youth I read the boys’ sports series about Garry Grayson. Exciting reads like “Garry Grayson at Stanley Prep,” “Garry Grayson’s Winning Touchdown.” He was my hero. This Grayson has made himself a hero to the multitudes who have been bombarding him with praise--and dollars--off his star turn in Congress.
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo is courtesy of Wikipedia, the online encylopedia. This column first posted Oct. 12, 2009.
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