Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) recently told a local news outlet, “Privately, John Boehner … doesn’t want someone like me around.”
Joe, Boehner’s not the only one who doesn’t want someone like you around.
Freshman Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) is known for his anti-Obama rhetoric on cable television and his inability to pay his child support payments. But during a recent meeting with constituents in his Chicago-area suburban district, Walsh lost his cool when several attendees asked about why banks have so much power in government. At one point, Walsh even threatened to eject a man who asked Walsh about the revolving door of bank lobbyists infiltrating Congress and financial regulatory agencies.
Walsh at one point screamed, “don’t blame the banks … this pisses me off!” After several constituents accurately pointed out that bank lobbyists occupy key positions within Congress, the SEC, and other oversight bodies that are supposed to supervise bank practices, Walsh began sticking his finger close to his constituent’s faces, yelling, “quiet for a minute or I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
The video is tough to watch, but is worth checking out anyway.
There are a couple of reasons why this is important. The first is that Walsh is plainly wrong on the substance. The right-wing freshman seriously believes “the government … demanded for years that everybody be in a home,” which led to a crash. Reality, as Alan Pyke explained, shows how untrue this is: “There’s not much left to say about the facts of the financial crisis, and if Walsh doesn’t know by now that the government policies that get him heated didn’t apply to the private lenders who enriched themselves by selling and trading predatory and fraudulent loans, he never will.”
But the other thing to keep in mind here is that public servants aren’t supposed to have breakdowns in public, just because constituents are more familiar with the basics of current events than they are. In this case, Walsh’s constituents calmly presented their congressman with facts, only to see their public servant lose his cool and become enraged.
I’m not even sure how a guy like this gets elected.
