Former Clinton Cabinet Secretary Uses Floods to Attack Texas and Ted Cruz

Reich’s general theme is that politicians who don’t tow the liberal big government line on issues are hypocritical when asking that Federal tax money gets returned to their state in the form of disaster relief.

Reich begins insulting anyone who expressed concern over the planned Jade Helm 15 military exercises as “nut cases” and saying:

Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott added to that particular outpouring of paranoia by ordering the Texas State Guard to monitor the military exercise. “It is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed upon,” he said.

Rather than the plain text reading that Abbott’s statement shows a concern for Texas citizen’s rights, Reich draws his own conclusion: “In other words, he’d protect Texans from this federal plot.”

Reich apparently missed the concern over Jade Helm coming from the left, including this article from Counterpunch called Why Are So-Called Progressives Defending Special Ops Training? It is enough for Reich to merely lob ad hominem attacks when the targets are Texas conservatives.

What really gets Reich’s goat is that historically independent Texas distrusts the Federal government. Reich cites recent polls that showed 57 percent of Texans view the Feds unfavorably and then launches into a dishonest attack on the recent request for federal disaster relief after floods devastated parts of the state. Reich writes:

Texas dislikes the federal government so much that eight of its congressional representatives, along with Senator Ted Cruz, opposed disaster relief for the victims of Hurricane Sandy – adding to the awkwardness of their lobbying for the federal relief now heading Texas’s way.

Reich wants to paint Republicans — Texans specifically — as cruel, heartless hypocrites and turns a blind eye to the wasteful, irrelevant spending that Democrats (and a few Republicans) snuck into the Hurricane Sandy bill.

The real reason that over thirty GOP Senators, including Cruz, actually opposed the Hurricane Sandy bill was not cruelty or opposition to fair Federal help. The opposition was based on the fact that the huge relief bill was packed with more pork than you would find in a warehouse full of jalapeño cheddar sausage.

As Breitbart News reported after the Hurricane Sandy bill passed:

On Friday, the U.S. Senate passed a $60.4 billion bill that contains expenditures for areas that were unaffected by the storm, including $2 million roof repairs for Smithsonian Institution museums, $150 million for Alaskan fisheries disasters, and $58 million in taxpayer dollars to plant trees on private property in areas where Sandy never touched down.  Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) attempted to remove the $150 million fisheries “pork” spending from the bill, but his amendment was defeated.

Finally, Reich turns to climate change and launches into Rep. Lamar Smith for calling United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “more political than scientific.”

Even though Reich admits he can not prove any connection between this latest round of Texas weather and the Democrat’s current trope on climate change, he doesn’t hesitate to mention it anyway.

Given this, you might also think Texas would take climate change especially seriously. But here again, there’s cognitive dissonance between what the state needs and how its officials act.

It’s notable that Reich would talk about topics like hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance, since this is the same Robert Reich who recently wrote the following about his former boss Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary Clinton, without any apparent irony:

Hillary Clinton should make the moral case about power: for taking it out of the hands of those with great wealth and putting it back into the hands of average working people.

The Clinton’s combined net worth is estimated to be over $100,000,000.