Check this out. Here is a screenshot from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare," in case you're a fuckin' moron). It's the first page from the version that was passed by the House and Senate in January 2010.
What's important here is the number at the top there. See it? It's 906 pages in a PDF downloaded from the Government Publishing Office. If you'll remember, Republicans freaked the fuck out over the length of the law and how no one had read it before it was passed. It was variously described as having 2300 or 2700 or 16,000 or 20,000 pages, depending on how desperate whichever conservative spoogebucket was spouting off and whether they were counting corrections and regulations issued in its wake. But the bill itself, which affected every single person living in this country directly with its provisions about what health insurance had to cover and who had to be covered, was 906 pages.
Even our current dink president was outraged over how long the bill was because Republicans could do it in fewer pages. Maybe 46, maybe 123, maybe 67. It was all a big fuckin' mystery, but, goddamnit, it was shorter than that fucker Obama could come up with.
This week, Congress passed the John McCain Totally Too Fucking Huge Defense Budget That Is a Giant Giveaway to Weapons Makers and a Continuation of Endless War and Endless Detention Without Trial and Holy Shit, This Is Just For a Single Year. And in remarks to soldiers, President Trump couldn't have been more pleased with himself (who else would he ever be pleased with?). He really said, "The National Defense Authorization Act is the most significant investment in our military and our warfighters in modern history, and I am very proud to be a big, big part of it."
Here's the first page of it, also downloaded as a PDF from the GPO:
You see that fuckin' number up top? It's 788. That's right. The defense budget is just 120 pages shorter than the law that remade a fifth of the entire American economy. And you fuckin' well know that not a single goddamn Republican representation or senator read the whole thing. You fuckin' well know that not one is gonna complain about the length. Complicated shit gets a complicated bill. It's that simple.
But we spend years arguing about how many pages Obamacare was. So the layers of hypocrisy in the Republican Party are so fuckin' deep that there are dinosaurs buried in that bullshit.
(Note: One other thing Trump said in his weirder than usual speech at Fort Drum is that the soldiers would only be real patriots if they gave up their raises to help with the national debt. No, really: "We are proudly giving our troops the biggest pay increase in a decade. And I know you don’t want it because you’re very patriotic. You’ll say, just save the money. We’re going to pay down debt. Does anybody not want it? Please raise your hand. What’s going on here? (Laughter.) Are these real patriots?" It's like the zombie corpse of Henny Youngman trying to articulate a joke through a rotting jaw.)
(Note 2: There are a fuck-ton of more important things going on, but I'm still trying to get my head around the horror of that Pennsylvania Catholic Church child rape report. Might have more on that tomorrow.)
