Who Fights the Pork
There are two kinds of partisans in politics. There’s the partisan of a cause. And there’s the partisan of a party. The former judges a proposal or act on how it serves one’s chosen cause; to the latter, judgments focus on one’s chosen organization.
So many pundits in and around the feeding trough that is Washington write as if it is only their party that matters. You know who and what I mean. Now take Robert Novak. Though a lot of people may think of him as a mere GOP partisan, he’s not. He directs some of his most trenchant criticisms at the GOP, when the party fails to promote causes Novak believes in.
In an early April column, “A bill full of pork,” Novak once again showed his true colors. The Republicans were marshaling the highway bill through Congress, and with it tons of pork, the kind of pork that they had ostensibly opposed when they took over Congress a decade earlier. Novak notes that the last such bill in Democratic hands had 538 pork projects earmarked for specific congressmen. This latest bill had 3,193 such earmarked expenditures.
Novak also emphasizes just how little many of these projects had to do with highways: a “Renaissance Square” in Rochester, a historic bus depot in Jessup, a Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. It’s all just pork for Porkville. You may not agree with Novak on everything (I don’t), but you have to admire his independence. And he’s often right. Not far right. Just right.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
