Boatloads of GSA Money… and This is the Best We Got

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – The GSA wasted $868,000, that’s about the amount of money Congress borrows in a minute to finance the deficit.  That’s how preposterous and ridiculous this is, but we’re all outraged over it.  The American taxpayer, if there is such an animal out there, should not be looking at this through the rose-colored glasses. What you should see is an insurmountable mountain.  You’re down at the bottom of Mount Everest and you just climbed 100 feet towards basecamp and now you’re going to rest and say, “We’re going to get to the top of this thing.  You just wait and see.”  Folks, the scale, again, human scale.  Read the transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  [mocking] “What we’re saying is GSA — what we have here is a boatload of federal money.  All you have to do is spend this boatload of federal money.  If you spend the boatload of federal money, then all will be right in the world because boatloads of federal money have been spent in Las Vegas.”  Remember, what is spent with boatloads of federal money in Vegas stays in Vegas.

[sound clip]

Justice Elena Kagan:  The federal government is here saying, we’re giving you a boatload of money.  There is no matching funds requirement.  There are no extraneous conditions attached to it.  It’s just a boatload of federal money for you to take and spend on poor people’s healthcare.  It doesn’t sound coercive to me, I have to tell you.

[end sound clip]

Mike:  Isn’t Justice Kagan’s explanation of “boatloads of federal money” and not understanding why the states don’t want to take it and spend it, isn’t that a precursor to the GSA spending a — how do you scale down a boatload?  This drop that is in the little children’s sand pail used to bail out the S.S. Titanic, that’s what this is in comparison to the grand scheme of things.  Just imagine if these members of the House of Representin’ would be so animated over an expenditure of, say $868 billion.  Now we’re talking a real part of the “boatload of federal money.”
$868 billion, where have I heard that before?  That’s about the amount that Rand was actually advocating needed to be cut, $850 billion — no, he had two attempts.  One was $500 billion and another was $800-some billion.  So the GSA has reportedly blown $868,000.  Kiddies, play along at home.  So I wrote down 868,000.  Now, let’s see what $868 billion looks like: 868,000,000,000.

So the nitwits that are feigning outrage over this — just to show you how ridiculous this is, are angry about one-tenth of one percent of what it would take to cut half of the current budget deficit.  Let me repeat.  I think my math is correct on that.  The GSA outrage accounts for one-tenth of one percent of one-half of the current budget deficit.  But we’re going to get to the bottom of this.  [mocking] “I might even get so angry about this that I might even end, end, do you hear me?  I might even call for the end, the annihilation of the GSA.”

[sound clip]

Rep. Jeff Denham:  If we continue to not only see this type of spending, we will continue to audit.  If we continue to see that you are not giving us the information on a bipartisan level to show us how these expenditures are happening, I am prepared to systematically pull apart GSA, to the point that we will make it a question to the American public on whether GSA is needed at all.

[end sound clip]

Mike:  Wow, we’ll ask the American public whether we actually need the GSA.  They wasted $868,000.  That’s about the amount of money Congress borrows in a minute to finance the deficit.  That’s how preposterous and ridiculous this is, but we’re all outraged over it.  The American taxpayer, if there is such an animal out there, the outraged American taxpayer should not be looking at this through the rose-colored glasses. What you should see is an insurmountable mountain.  You’re down at the bottom of Mount Everest and you just climbed 100 feet towards basecamp and now you’re going to rest and say, “We’re going to get to the top of this thing.  You just wait and see.”  Folks, the scale, again, human scale.  Andrew, is my math correct?  Is it one-tenth of one percent or one-hundredth of one percent?

AG:  I think your math is correct there.

Mike:  Let’s talk about human scale again.  Remember, the government is out of scale.  We know this because Professor Donald Livingston, Kirkpatrick Sale, Tom DiLorenzo and the authors of Rethinking the American Union have fastidiously written a book about it and have demonstrated exactly how far out of scale it is and how ridiculous it is that you can ever hope to reform it.  I’ve just walked the audience through a little exercise.  Why isn’t someone like John Stossel doing this?  Why isn’t someone in the major American press corps that has all these high and mighty and lofty cable television shows doing this?  The outrage over what it was that the GSA did or what these clowns in the GSA did, of course, you’re not supposed to do that.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Dana Milbank has, in The Washington Post has the right attitude towards this.  I think that if you take a look at Milbank’s column today, it is titled “Debauchery: An American Specialty.”  Milbank’s point is those Secret Service agents that got drunk, wound up in a hotel room with a bunch of high-priced call girls in Colombia were not embarrassment to the President of the United States.  They weren’t even embarrassments, or they didn’t even rise to the level of “children will be children,” we being the parents, of course, this is par for the course.

These members of the Secret Service, who apparently can’t figure out how to do service acts in secret, are actually just being regular debaucherous Americans.  They’re acting just like Snooki.  They’re acting just like Lindsay “Hohan,” Paris Hilton, name your famous debauched American.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is the best we can do.  The Secret Service shacking up, hooking up with high-priced — what if we find out they weren’t even high-priced call girls in South America.

AG:  We know the price, $47 or something like that.

Mike:  Let me ask all you people out there that have participated in the ruination of the once-great vaunted American culture, what would one of the stars of your favorite movie series The Hangover do in Colombia when presented with the same opportunity?  They would probably take the Secret Service route.  So Milbanks’ point is:

[reading]

Before we get to the dancing penises at the National Institutes of Health, let’s begin our discussion with the Secret Service agents’ dalliance with prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia.  “We’re representing the people of the United States,” President Obama said Sunday when asked about the agents and military personnel who, after a night of heavy drinking, reportedly procured prostitutes at a strip club called the Pleyclub.  “And when we travel to another country I expect us to observe the highest standards.”

But the president has it exactly backward.  It is precisely when federal workers go abroad that they should hold themselves to the lowest standards.  We are, after all, the land of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Snooki.  Debauchery is an American specialty.  The president should be promoting the export of our culture.

[end reading]

Mike:  When we send a movie down to South America, do we send a movie with James Stewart in it, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or do we send an episode of Jersey Shore as our representation?

End Mike Church Show Transcript