Rep. Pete Sessions accuses Obama of deliberately driving stock market down
04:10 PM CDT on Monday, May 11, 2009
dallasnews.com
( Dave has an elected twin moron! )
By TODD J. GILLMAN / The Dallas Morning News
tgillman@dallasnews.com
WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions of Dallas, a member of the House Republican leadership, is accusing President Barack Obama of intentionally driving up unemployment and dampening stock prices in a bid to consolidate power.
Sessions told The New York Times that the administration intends to “diminish employment and diminish stock prices” as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy.
And he asserted that the Obama agenda is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”
White House aides declined to comment.
Other Democrats denounced Sessions for accusing the president of economic sabotage. Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, called his counterpart’s views a “bizarre conspiracy theory.”
The remarks, he said, “have no place in our current economic debate…. The American people want leadership to address our economic challenges, yet the Republicans are responding with one ridiculous sound bite after another.”
Sessions, elected to his seventh House term last fall, chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party organization that defends incumbents and tries to win more House seats.
The NRCC’s chief spokesman, Ken Spain, defended the allegation that Obama – who has repeatedly vowed to help the economy recover – secretly welcomes a slump in employment and investments.
Sessions “was simply reiterating what many members of the Democratic Party have been saying over the last several weeks. He was addressing concerns over one-party dominance in Washington, and how it has further damaged our economy and undercut our free enterprise system,” Spain said.
As evidence, Spain provided quotations from four Democratic House members, none of which reflects a view that Obama is intentionally trying to put Americans out of work. Two involve criticism of the administration’s proposal to limit carbon emissions to fight global warming. The others reflect a more general criticism that Obama’s energy policies would cost jobs.
This isn’t the first time since Sessions took the campaign-committee chairmanship last fall that aides have been asked to explain statement taken in some quarters as inflammatory.
In February, Sessions told the National Journal that Republicans, as the minority party, might emulate insurgents such as the Taliban.
"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," he said at the time. "They went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes…. I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban.”
Sessions’ latest comment was included in a Times column exploring the political implications for Obama and Democrats if unemployment remains high through the 2010 midterm elections. |
