A bear awakened

Last week U.S. Sen. John Boozman got positive national notices, albeit with his surname mispronounced like the “booze” that is drunk instead of the “bose” that is the sound-wave music system.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

What Boozman did so notably, according to an anonymously sourced back-room account of a Republican Senate caucus from Politico, was get angrily in the face of that grandstanding extremist right-winger from Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz.

It was on account of Cruz’s daring to suggest that other Republican senators weren’t really opposed to Obamacare if they didn’t support Cruz’s … well, something, either shutting down the government or talking for 21 hours or comparing Obamacare to Nazism or all or none of that.

It was never clear.

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Boozman has contended consistently and responsibly that a shutdown threat is hollow and fatally flawed.

By the Politico account, which Boozman didn’t deny when asked for a comment, the normally obsequious former Razorback lineman stood and raised his voice to Cruz to say he hadn’t been bullied since the seventh grade, and certainly wasn’t going to be bullied now by him.

Details on the seventh-grade incident were unavailable at press time.

Boozman told Tea Party Ted that he’d been fighting against the Affordable Care Act longer than Cruz had. He said he resented that Cruz had fomented a climate in which solidly anti-Obamacare Republican senators were being inundated with angry calls suggesting that they were capitulators.

When even the mildest-mannered ones like Boozman-indeed the invisible ones-are driven to openly expressed hostility, to raise their voices and point their fingers, then you know that the offense against them is especially egregious.

And such was the case with Cruz’s utter pointlessness on the Senate floor last week.

Senate Republican colleagues reportedly applauded Boozman after he verbally slapped the silly Texan.

Remember that Boozman routed, without a runoff, nearly a half-dozen Ted Cruz wannabes to win the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2010. So he knows the type. And he knows the type can be dispensed with easily enough.

However …

Boozman probably would have preferred that his moment with Cruz be kept in the Republican family.

He probably didn’t want the matter to get published and talked about on national cable news.

That’s because you don’t want to rile your primitive lunatic base unnecessarily. And, with the incident a matter of public consumption, you’ll need to make doubly clear-lest anyone get confused, as many will-that you hate Obamacare as much or more than anybody.

So Boozman showed up the next day on right-wing blabber radio in Little Rock.

He wanted to make sure that the listening Tea Party audience heard from him that, whatever they might have read or been told about his having a run-in with their hero, he was as anti-Obamacare as they come.

Then Boozman, while in this talk-radio twilight zone, told a blatant and irresponsible untruth.

That ought to reinstate his bona fides with his base.

He did so either from misinformation or out of an intentional and convenient lack of accurate information or simply to lie for the political advantage of it.

Knowing Boozman, I suspect that a lack of information-conveniently intentional or otherwise, and I can easily see him either haplessly uninformed or purposely so-is more believable than wholesale dishonesty.

What he said was that conservatives are winning the Obamacare debate because people are getting a look at these new insurance rates-which aren’t bad overall, in truth-and that we are seeing, for example, that Obamacare is causing skyrocketing health-insurance premiums for our state’s teachers.

Baloney.

As everyone who remotely understands the teacher health-insurance crisis knows: The $48 million deficit in self-insurance resulted because the state and school districts long contributed too little to plans that provided too generously and weren’t utilized by teachers and school employees universally; that a kind of death spiral occurred when premiums rose and more teachers bailed out or switched into lower-cost, lower-quality teacher-system plans that, depending on the ailment, might have provided just as generous a benefit.

Yes, it is accurate to say that the foundation of this exponentially compounding problem was rising healthcare costs. But we’re talking about rising health costs over the last several years, prior to Obamacare.

It is quite simply a wholly indisputable fact that Obamacare has nothing to do with the teacher health-insurance crisis.

A senator who says otherwise besmirches the public dialogue and is worthy of the caliber of scolding that Ted Cruz got from a normally meek optometrist the other day.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 89 on 09/29/2013

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