It has always been rare for the Plain Dealer to criticize Sen. George Voinovich. However, a PD editorial recently did chastise him obliquely for clinging to the Republican refusal to extend unemployment benefits. The legislators went home on vacation. They left hanging some 2 million jobless people desperate for help.
The PD noted editorially that the House of Representatives had passed an acceptable bill.
The Senate refused. The usual filibuster block. The editorial said, “Instead, the Senate once again landed in an ideological bog, with enough Republicans – including Ohio’s George Voinovich – insisting on using unspent money from last year’s stimulus bill to pay for the unemployment benefits to prevent a final vote.
Hardly more than a slap at the wrist.
Voinovich, however, always touchy about any criticism, responded with a letter to the editor published in yesterday’s PD. It explained that he would have voted for the Democratic measure if the Democrats would only use unspent stimulus money for the unemployment funding. It was a matter of priorities apparently.
So the millions were left hanging.
Now Voinovich considers himself a fierce deficit hawk.
That’s his basic reason to keep a couple of million out-of-work people and their families without the needed resources to live. It’s a let them eat cake attitude.
Voinovich sends out constituent messages that continually highlight our national deficit and tries to scare constituents with hefty figures that each citizen owes. By implication, he makes himself a guardian of the public treasury.
His recording of the deficit doesn’t, however, tell us where much of the money is spent or what to really do about it.
What’s odd to me is that I never hear Voinovich crusading against, for example, the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for which neither he nor his party required us to pay. How much does that add to the deficit, Senator? Please tell us in your next constituent letter.
I’ve never heard him crusade about our nation going deeper and deeper in debt as we spend more and more on armed forces – more than “all other nations on Earth combined,” as Chalmers Johnson puts it in “Nemesis – the last days of the American republic.”
No. George reserves his courageous deficit stand on the trickle of money that might flow to desperate jobless families – people who can’t find jobs in this corporate-created deep recession. I guess he feels that way about his brother Vic, too.
He’s never been a crusader against the vast expansion of American power at great cost.
He can’t have been in the U. S. Senate for 12 years and not know any of this. Apparently, however, he can ignore the obvious causes of U. S. government spending.
“After all, we now station over a half million U. S. troops, spies contractors, dependents, and other on more than 737 military bases spread around the world,” Chalmers wrote in 2006. “These bases are located in 130 countries, many of them presided over by dictatorial regimes that have given their citizens no say in the decision to let us in. The Pentagon publishes an inventory of the real estate it owns in its annual ‘Base Structure Report’, but it’s official account of between 737 and 800 overseas installations is incomplete, omitting all our espionage bases and a number of others that are secret or could be embarrassing for the United States.”
Chalmers also notes: “Some of the ‘rest and recreation’ facilities include the armed forces ski center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps, over two hundred military golf courses around the world, some 71 Learjets and other luxury aircraft to fly admirals and generals to such watering holes and luxury hotels for our troops and families in Tokyo, Seoul, and the Italian Riviera, at Florida’s Disney World, and many other places.”
Voinovich showed his Christian credentials when as Governor he limited welfare over one’s lifetime to three years when the feds allowed a state to go to five years. I wonder how many Ohioans are not caught in that trap.
I hope Sen. Voinovich enjoys the generous benefits he will get from a life of “public service” he’s enjoyed the past decades.
He’ll soon be highly praised by the Plain Dealer for his services as he ends his career. It will be a paean without doubt.
Here is the PD editorial.
And George’s defense of himself here.
Roldo Bartimole celebrates 50 years of news reporting this year. He published and wrote Point of View, a newsletter about Cleveland, for 32 years. He worked for the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal in the 1960s.
He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991.