Shameful Human of the Week: Randy Neugebauer

This week’s Shameful Human is Randy Neugebauer, the Republican Representative from Texas who shouted out “baby killer” during last night’s debate over health care reform in the US Congress. Mr. Neugebauer has since claimed that he was referring to the health care bill under debate, rather than his presumed target Bart Stupak, a Democrat who had initially opposed the bill because, he claimed, it would allow abortions to be federally subsidized, but ultimately voted for it anyway.

Neugebauer is a convenient stand-in for the sheer and utter lunacy that is American political discourse today. Is it even worth mentioning that the bill in question did not provide federal subsidization of abortion? Of course not, reality itself has been rendered irrelevant by the American right, and insane knee-jerk reactions that confuse and inspire anger in the electorate are all that matter.

Yesterday saw the United States Congress pass a law which would moderately reform their country’s broken health care system by requiring citizens to buy health insurance from already wildly profitable corporations, and it still felt a bit too much like “socialism” for Republicans like Neugebauer to vote for it. Now his party has transformed their website into a hellscape of rage, ten states with Republican attorney generals are readying to file a lawsuit challenging the legislation, and the unofficial voice of the GOP is claiming the entire country is on the brink.

This is the unreality in which Americans live, and bloated Mr. Potato Head stand-ins like Randy Neugebauer are the cause of it.

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