House Republican Campaign Committee Chairman, Pete Sessions (CD32 – Texas), has quickly established himself as the Republican most likely to say something to embarrass his colleagues and/or his constituents. Sessions may have hit a new low recently, though, when he told The New York Times that President Obama “intended to ‘diminish employment and diminish stock prices’ as part of a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy to consolidate power.” (Source: The New York Times, May 10, 2009) Sessions’ comments were not only simple-minded and foolishly partisan, they are demonstrably wrong – the stock market has climbed almost 8 percent since President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on February 17.
- Just 20 days after President Obama signed the stimulus legislation, the stock market began a steady climb that has continued for over a month.
- Since Congress passed the President’s budget just two weeks ago, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone up more than 5.5 percent.
- Conversely, in Bush’s eight years in office the stock market fell almost 25 percent. (Source: Google Finance)
Because the facts aren’t on the Republicans’ side, Sessions just made things up. He has become the misinformed mouthpiece of the partisan Republicans in Congress, who have done everything they can to stop President Obama from advancing his agenda that has started turning the economy around.
More Sessions’ Screw-ups
NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions has established a dubious reputation for saying and doing one foolish thing after another:
- In February, Sessions described the Taliban as a “model” for the Republican insurgency in the U.S. House of Representatives.
- Sessions’ actions haven’t been much better than his words, as after embarrassing himself by holding a fundraiser at a Las Vegas burlesque club last year, he returned to Vegas in February to hold a fundraiser at “a racy venue in Las Vegas whose Web site features come-hither looking women scantily clad in lingerie slithering all over each other.” (Source: The Washington Post, May 4, 2009)
- This isn’t a new phenomenon, either, as back in 2004 Sessions compared the attack on the World Trade Center Towers and the ongoing war in Iraq as “games.” In simplistic and insulting terms, Sessions called 9/11 a “home game” and U.S. military intervention in Iraq an “away game.”
