Iola Register: Jenkins & Ryun Both Too Stupid to be in Congress

Good golly Miss Molly!

From the Iola Register:

Saturday morning the two Republican candidates for the Second District Congressional seat now held by Democrat Nancy Boyda spoke at the Farm Bureau forum in the high school.

Jim Ryun said he wants his seat back. He held it for 10 years and lost it to Boyda in the 2006 Democratic revival. Ryun spent most of his time at the podium recalling his glory days as a miler, beginning with his high school triumphs in track and cross country.

He'll figure it out eventually: NO ONE IS GOING TO SEND YOU TO CONGRESS BECAUSE YOU USED TO RUN FAST!

Now, the crazy:

Perhaps his most revealing comments came when he was asked if he would favor federal policies that discouraged corporations from paying their chief executive officers enormous salaries and bonuses. No, he said, he would not. That’s the business of the board of directors, he said. Well, then, would he vote for a law requiring company directors to submit CEO salary proposals to the stockholders? No, he would not.

Government, he said, should stay out of the way private businesses are managed.

Oh. My. God. Did Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover teach the Republican Party nothing?

With the nation at the verge of recession, or already in one, because of a housing and credit crisis brought about by reckless decisions made by the very highly paid CEOs of the nation’s top investment banks and mortgage brokers, Ryun’s hands-off- business stances are as curious as they were out of touch with public opinion.

The questions he was asked offered him a great opportunity to talk about today’s shaky economy, what government could do to revive it and should do to narrow the scandalous gap between the nation’s super rich and the rest of the people. He flubbed it.

Exactly!

Now, moving from out-of-touch and stupid on to stupid & dangerously clueless:

Then came State Treasurer Lynn Jenkins. She accused Boyda of running up the federal deficit with reckless pork barrel spending and promised to use her skills as a CPA to cut spending and reduce the deficit — as though inexpert bookkeeping were the problem.

When question time rolled around, she was asked how she felt about the war in Iraq.

My training as a CPA didn’t teach me how to fight a war, she said. “But I know who does have those skills: the generals who are leading the troops. Those are the ones we should listen to on war policy.”

That's twice she's been heard by a journalist saying she didn't know anything about the military (exactly what we need in a time of war) and that she was perfectly comfortable turning over her constitutional duty to, well, really, anyone else.

Jenkins apparently rejects the principle of civilian control of the military, a bedrock principle of our democracy. The generals on the ground do what the Secretary of Defense tells them to do and the Secretary of Defense follows instructions from the Commander in Chief. The president, in turn, is pledged to represent and serve the people at large — which is what the upcoming elections and the political campaigns which precede them are all about.

Voters should expect candidates for election to Congress to have a well-reasoned stand on the course our country should take on Iraq and Afghanistan. Jenkins apparently does not.

What an embarrassment of embarrassments the Kansas Republican Party has turned out for candidates against Congresswoman Nancy Boyda. First, a man who think the same laissez-faire policies that plunged this country into the Great Depression are what we need in the face of our currently lagging economy, and second a woman who is so blithely ignorant of her own responsibilities as an elected official you can almost hear her giggling as she pushes her profoundly depressing lack of a clue.