Word: pork
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...advertising agency, ran a series of focus-group studies for the Beef Industry Council that suggest that when it comes to food, people show an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion. A woman believed she was eating a low-fat diet because she was pouring the fat off her pork chops. Others forsook meat for healthy salads, and then drowned those salads in dressings that contained more fat than the meat they gave...
Sure, we may accept the higher rates for a few years, but when things don't magically get better, we begin to get antsy. "All those taxes, and there are still poor people around. The money must all be going to governmental inefficiency and pork-barrel politics." So we vote in a new face who promises to lower taxes, and then a year later we scream when our local fire station closes down for lack of funding. We want solutions, but we don't want to pay for them...
When he is not in attack mode, Armey can be highly productive. In 1987 he launched a crusade to close obsolete military bases, an almost hopeless cause in a Congress where everyone defends home-state pork with a passion. But Armey advocated giving a bipartisan commission the full authority to do the job. Passage of this measure altered his reputation as a legislator, proving that he could listen and persuade. Yet his highest skill lies in attack by ridicule, usually through the deft use of symbolism. It was Armey who first unveiled a Byzantine chart of the Clinton health plan...
...chomped on a cigar in his seat as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee long after the ashtrays were removed, could be a poster child for term limits. More liberal than his east Texas constituents on issues like civil rights, he had hung tenaciously to office, power, perks and pork by fiercely protecting his constituents' love of guns, rice subsidies and the death penalty. He was also good at delivering federal building projects and disaster relief, as needed...
...Brooks' last grab for a slab of bacon proved too much for his sated constituency. After he managed to get $10 million for the Jack Brooks Criminal Justice Center at Brooks' alma mater Lamar College slipped into the crime bill, voters saw pork for the bad financial bargain it is -- two dollars in federal taxes for every one that might come back to the district in the form of pork. Stockman, who had been trounced by Brooks in 1992, saw his chance and tried again. Some Republicans in Texas ignored him as a wild man. (Stockman unfurled posters that said...