Congressman Allen West is all about "equality of opportunity." He blabbered about it, to thunderous applause, back in January. After yelling about beaches and Georgia and how great it is that he has a job, here's what he said about giving everybody a shot:
No matter where you are born, no matter where you come from to these great shores that we call America ... you're given those chances, you're given the opportunities to succeed, you're given a ladder upon which you can climb to have whatever greatness that you wish. And the heart and true soul of the Republican Party and conservatives is that we understand that sometimes you're gonna slip off of that ladder. But we will have a safety net there for you so that you can bounce back up and continue to climb. See, equality of opportunity leads to economic freedom.
Ok, that sounds reasonable, right? Give people the ladder, and make them climb. Seems to be the definition of federal student loan programs, eh? A little help pulling yourself out of whatever your situation is, to get a college education and better yourself and your economic chances? NO. YOU ARE WRONG AND LOANS ARE COMMUNIST.
"Remember, if you start dictating where people can go to school, the loans that they can get, and the payment of those loans -- I gotta tell you, that's something that [garbled] in a book written by Marx or Engels called The Communist Manifesto," he said late last week. "It's called the state control of education."
It doesn't seem like Dummycrats are the only ones who would acknowledge that it's not called state control of education, so let's just toss that aside until somebody can prove the government is the only group loaning people money.
Maybe if you get your graduate degrees while you're in the military you don't have to deal with outside loans, but everybody else seems to know banks give out student loans all the time. He could be referring to the warnings of an "education bubble" developing because of government involvement in student lending, but what he said was his usual Marx Engels Progressive Communist Democrat Party thing, which he said he knows inflames people and that's why he does it -- and he's not above simply making things up to make the charges stick.
"Apparently any policy decision West disagrees with is evidence of a communist plot," said Anthony Kusich, spokesman for Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy, in a release. "The people of the Treasure Coast and Palm Beaches need both sides to get together and offer serious solutions to our problems, not continue the divisive name-calling that got us into this gridlock."
