Don't call her Ma'am, call her ex-senator..

Stool Sample

Fred Barnes, writing in the Weekly Standard, gets it right:

Barbara Boxer under pressure is like a reckless driver in traffic. She’s out of control and extremely careless. “You know, like, I don’t want to go back to the days when thousands of people died every day because they had no insurance,” she declared in a debate in late September. Boxer, as best one could tell, was referring to the era before President Obama’s health care plan was enacted.

If true, at least 730,000 people were dying annually in America for lack of health insurance. (To do the math, it’s a minimum of 2,000 deaths every 24 hours multiplied by 365 days.) That’s a staggering number of people who presumably couldn’t get life-saving medical care because they were without an insurance policy to foot the bill.

But then he usually does.

The article is a must read for as much as it reveals the many, many warts of the incompetent, ineffective Boxer (fractious, and an economic "mental midget") as for some stunning insights into Carly's character. But, Fred's main theme is the train wreck that is Boxer:

..One, in the heat of a reelection campaign, Boxer will say just about anything so long as she can get away with it. And she usually can. Two, she is under extraordinary pressure from Fiorina, by far the strongest Republican candidate she’s ever faced. Three, Boxer is a tough, resourceful, and shrewd campaigner and not too haughty to correct a false statement when necessary to avert trouble.

Often that’s not necessary. Boxer, 69, makes so many dubious, untrue, hypocritical, or outlandish remarks in a single debate that most of them fly by without registering. Thank heaven for transcripts.

And she uncorks some show-stoppers: Boxer claims that Roe v. Wade "was a decision that brought us together" and "Sixty two percent of our people were going broke due to a health care crisis" to cite two that go unchecked and unquestioned by a fawning media and panel of questioners at the debates. She is not only incompetent as a senator, her attitude seems to pour sand into the gearbox of Senate machinations:

On immigration, “we have to stop this arguing,” she said. “We have to come together.” This is odd coming from a notoriously argumentative senator, one for whom the label “bitterly partisan” could have been invented. Boxer was removed last summer as lead senator on the cap and trade bill to clamp down on carbon emissions because she was too fractious to line up sufficient votes.

Fred Barnes -- arguably writing from the right side of the political spectrum but a fair and respected chronicler of the events inside the Beltway -- sums up Boxer's affinity for expanding veracity:

• The stimulus is creating tens of thousands of jobs in California ~~ where employment went form 10.9% in february 2009 to 12.4% today. Another liberal wet-dream.
• Ending the war in Afghanistan will be a trillion dollars. Great, Babs, just how do we do that?
• Reducing the national debt can be helped by “collecting from people who are ripping off the government and other uncollected payments to the government".
• And the tired old liberal saw, "stopping tax breaks to the millionaires and the billionaires .  .  . that’s almost another trillion."

Barnes' article gives Carly the best chance in 18 years to get this festering piece of liberal sludge -- oh, excuse me, that's Senator festering-piece of liberal sludge --  dislodged from her seat and sent back to her left-wing elitist friends in beautiful Marin County where she belongs:

But if any conservative can win California, it’s Fiorina. And Boxer’s penchant, when under pressure, for saying just about anything may help. “I love the military,” Boxer said in the TV debate. That’s a whopper, both preposterous and laughable. A few more of those may put Fiorina over the top.

I'd say the time is about right.

(Parting note on an inquiring mind: I had heard that Boxer used a stool behind her podium during the first debate with Fiorina. I am guessing that Lisa Benson's cartoon above is perhaps a tacit clue that that was true. Anyone out there confirm this?)

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