Every once in a while, a politician speaks the truth. Today, that politician is Georgia Republican Jack Kingston, talking about the possibility of Congress voting on a resolution authorizing President Obama to use force in Iraq and possibly Syria against ISIS. Behold:
"A lot of people would like to stay on the sideline and say, 'Just bomb the place and tell us about it later,' " said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, who supports having an authorization vote. "It's an election year. A lot of Democrats don't know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don't want to change anything. We like the path we're on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long."
Now that is some serious candor. Not that it isn't anything a hundred pundits might observe (because it's true), but it's not often you catch a politician being so forthright, particularly when he's talkiong about his own party. How can such a thing be explained?
It's not complicated: Jack Kingston is retiring. He ran for Senate this year (unsuccessfully), and in order to do so, he had to give up his House seat. So he has been liberated.
And as long as we're on the subject of people being candid (or not), there's another quote I want to point out from the same newspaper. In an article about President Obama saying some things that have gotten him into trouble (I'm not even going to use the "g" word), we get this little gem:
To Mr. Obama's critics, the disparity between the president's previous statements and today's reality reflects not simply poorly chosen words but a fundamentally misguided view of the world. Rather than clearly see the persistent dangers as the United States approaches the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, they said, Mr. Obama perpetually imagines a world as he wishes it were.
"I don't think it is just loose talk, I think it's actually revealing talk," said Peter H. Wehner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush now at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "Sometimes words are mistakes; they're just poorly put. But sometimes they're a manifestation of one's deep belief in the world and that's what you really get with President Obama."
So there you have it: when my guy says something that in retrospect looks misguided or mistaken, his words are just a slip of the tongue, revealing nothing (and if memory serves, Wehner's old boss did say a few such things). But when your guy does the same, his words reveal his true nature. But only the words we don't like! When he says things that turn out to be true or wise or right, that's just a bunch of phony baloney and you can ignore it.
