Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s tequila-fueled, Kookville Express pulled into the D.C. train station last night to “slam” President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address for the good folks at National Review Online.
Rohrabacher–who loves to be portrayed as an insightful, tough Republican by fawning media outlets–reportedly called the speech “arrogant” and “belligerent.”
As usual, the remarks by Orange County’s senior, career politician–the one who first campaigned in 1988 on the dire necessity of term limits and is now seeking a 28th year in Congress–were loaded with stark hypocrisy.
National Review reporter Andrew Stiles described Rohrabacher as “particularly outraged by the president’s pronouncement that he would bypass Congress and achieve his preferred policy outcomes through executive authority.”
Said the congressman, “He was basically saying, ‘you do this, or I’m going to do it on my own.’ This is a constitutional government. The president has certain powers, and he’s supposed to work with Congress. For him to come over here and say he’s going to do things on his own is arrogant and belligerent.”
Hmmmm.
Presidential overreach? Blatant trampling of congress’ constitutional powers? When have we witnessed such arrogant and belligerent conduct in the past?
Oh, that’s right: The Iran-Contra scandal, where Ronald Reagan’s administration secretly defied Congress’ Boland Amendment to fund a foreign army operating in Nicaragua and to provide arms to terrorists in Iran.
Maybe Rohrabacher has never heard of that presidential power grab that resulted in more than a dozen indictments and a nationally-televised apology by Reagan.
But that can’t be true.
Not only did the congressman work as a junior speechwriter/publicist in the Reagan administration, but he also has spent the last two decades defending this team’s laughably nutty arms-for-hostages conduct.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime ReportingĀ for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise fromĀ New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.