Chet Edwards, a 20-year member of Congress, assumed control of newly drawn Texas District 17 during the Tom Delay sponsored redistricting. He was the only Democrat able to maintain his seat in Congress in the 1992 Congressional election.
TX 17 is much more than President G.W. Bush’s district. It is home of:
- Texas A&M, a behemoth of bureaucrats, researchers and an airport beholden to tax funding,
- Fort Hood, another leviathan, a 340 square mile installation (217,337 acres) and the only post in the United States capable of stationing and training two Armored Divisions. This makes Fort Hood a tax funded construction contractor’s dream,
- Baylor University and Medical School, another higher education facility with its hand ready to be shook in allegiance,
- a collective of the Southernism known as “Yellow Dog Democrats”—ranchers, cotton and corn farmers, country folk, and retired military.
In Congress, Edwards is “one of the few House Members on both the Budget and Appropriations Committees and one of two House Democrats serving on three subcommittees.”
In response to Speaker Pelosi’s announcement, Edwards released this political biography:
Edwards is the Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs. In his first year as Chairman of the House Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee in 2007, Congressman Edwards authored a historic increase of $11.8 billion in veterans’ health care and benefits, the largest increase in veterans funding in the 77-year history of the Veterans Administration (VA). Today, the Appropriations Committee unanimously passed the fiscal year 2009 bill, which increases VA spending by $2.9 billion above the President’s request and $4.6 billion more than the historic fiscal year 2008 level.
But what kind of man is Chet Edwards and what does he bring to the Obama ticket?
After winning the newly drawn District 17 in 1992, Edwards gave an informative political seminar: Winning in the Red States. If Obama practices the Alinsky method of political jujitsu, he’s a piker compared to Edwards. In the seminar, Edwards regales how he politically destroyed his Republican challenger, Arlene Wohlmeguth, by finding a pitiable victim of Wohlmeguth’s state level cuts in the CHIP. program. Edwards played the “Republicans starve children” ad and burned his opposition to the ground. Where Obama wins his races through political duplicity, Edwards is a hard-core Texas politician in the LBJ mold and he knows how to scare his constituents for votes.
Veterans are, in the words of Bonfire of the Vanities race pimp Rev. Bacon, “Steam Control” and Edwards knows how to keep the steam stoked and ready for his political machinations. In 2004, Edwards successfully stoked his Veteran steam to near explosion by playing a carney shell game with a willing and gullible press to get the headline he wanted in order to scare his own vote base: Lawmakers Work To Fill $1 Billion Gap In Funding For VA Lawmakers. The game involved bringing up a shortage in funding for veterans in a budget committee rather than in the appropriation committee of which Edwards is a member.
“I was accused of making partisan attacks. Now some of those people have apologized to me and are saying I was right and they were wrong,” Edwards said.
Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a member of the House Budget Committee, said Edwards’ efforts in that committee wouldn’t have made a difference because the panel votes on a budget blueprint, not appropriations.
Edwards is a prime mover in the insidious Democratic Party activity of insinuating that our government is not giving enough money, care, or help to group “X” in order to emotionally cripple their own voter base. This disgusting practice allows the perpetrator to self-anoint himself as the benefactor to his victim voter. Nothing is more debilitating to the mental health of a veteran than to start a whisper campaign that they are in fact being used and tossed away. What veterans must recognize in order to not fall under the spell of such duplicity is that the Democratic Party cares nothing for a military man until he in fact is blessed enough to actually become a veteran. Note in the above mentioned bio/press release that Edwards only lists massive spending increases for veterans and nothing for active duty troops.
Edwards first vote in this current Congress was the party line vote that refused to fund the surge in Iraq. Ditto the F.I.S.A. bill that has remained in limbo underneath Speaker Pelosi’s desk blotter until last Tuesday when Edwards gushingly reported to his constituents in his weekly radio interview that in a massive move of “bi-partisanship”—a constant buzzword in Chetspeak—Congress finally came together to pass the FISA bill. In the alternative world of those in the know, that means Congressional Democrats finally dug the bill out of the dark hole they had hidden it for almost 4 months and actually put the bill up for a vote.
This is a brief introduction to the man Nancy Pelosi has selected for Obama’s Vice-President and the method of power he would bring to the ticket. This would be a powerful Democratic ticket and Republicans would be wise to attend a Fight Club seminar before challenging an Obama/Edwards merger because as Fight Club says, “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” Chet Edwards knows how to fight and is not afraid of the dark alley.
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