BUY THAT SENATOR A NEWSPAPER SUBSCRIPTION…. I’ve noticed, from time to time, that Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) seems to be a little slow on the uptake. As the New York Times‘ Gail Collins noted this week, after the senator tried to talk about Wall Street reform, and demonstrated no meaningful understanding of what he was saying, she “began to suspect that Massachusetts’s junior senator is not a deep thinker.”
But yesterday offered a classic example of the problem with Brown. Matt Corley notes that the senator appeared on a right-wing Massachusetts radio show, complaining about President Obama’s follow-through.
“[T]here needs to be consistency. That’s kind of the problem with, with what I’m saying. The fact that they’re not making decisions. And if they make a decision, they don’t stick by it. For example, with Iran. You know, ‘we’re going to have sanctions! If you guys don’t do this by this date, you’re in trouble!’ Ok, the date comes we don’t do anything. You know, ‘We’re going to have more sanctions, if you don’t do this, you know, you’re going to be in trouble.’ And so, you need to, you need to stick to your guns and make sure you follow through and that’s not happening.”
There might be a reasonable point in here somewhere, if a) Brown knew what he was saying; and b) wasn’t proven wrong by reality.
Ironically, just as Brown was complaining about Obama not following through on sanctions on Iran, the president was hosting a bill-signing ceremony in the White House — where Obama imposed tough new sanctions on Iran. Some of Brown’s Republican colleagues were even there for the event.
This is on top of the Obama administration’s successful efforts to impose new sanctions on Iran through the United Nations.
So, when Scott Brown uses this as an example of the president and his team “not making decisions,” that doesn’t make any sense. When he says this is evidence of Obama and administration officials failing to “follow through,” that’s just as absurd.
I guess what annoys me most about Scott Brown is that I feel as though I know people just like him — in the neighborhood, in the family, etc. These are the kind of folks who seem interested in public affairs, and feel like they’re supposed to have opinions on important developments, but never quite get around to paying attention to the news or learning anything substantive about the subjects they claim to care about.
In my heart of hearts, I don’t think Brown is lying. I rather doubt he appeared on that radio show yesterday, hoping to deliberately deceive listeners about the sanctions on Iran the president was just signing into law.
The problem is that Brown doesn’t seem to keep up on current events, but likes to pretend he does. That’s not a crime; a lot of people do this. But a lot of people aren’t U.S. senators.
As a result, this guy ends up saying demonstrably ridiculous things about the stimulus, financial regulatory reform, health care reform, economic policy, and energy policy, among other things.
Looking back, Brown probably didn’t expect to win his Senate race, and may not have felt it necessary to learn about these issues. But play time is over. He’s a senator now. Now would be a good time to … I don’t know … start reading a daily newspaper or something.
