On Monday, August 2, 2010, Congressman Tom Perriello was given a long overdue whupping, not by his mother, but by Carole Thorpe, chair of the Jefferson Area Tea Party.
At the evening press conference, Ms. Thorpe along with Alex Cortes of DefundIt.org and Dr. Gary Helmbrecht took turns taking Perriello to task for breaking his “abortion pledge,” among many other transgressions and outright deceptions.
The boy Congressman has continued to defy his constituents by ignoring their collective expressed will—consequently, anti-Perriello rage is rising throughout Virginia’s 5th Congressional District.
Since his election, Tom has rested comfortably in Speaker Pelosi’s lap, enjoying perpetual admiration and the occasional belly “skritch” and “biscuit treat” from Queen Nancy. But his life of comfort and privilege is soon to end if Ms. Thorpe and Virginia’s liberty-loving citizens have their way in November.
If two-faced Tom had been properly disciplined as a child, perhaps this would not be necessary. But he was not, and it is.
Spare the rod and spoil the child. Thanks for showing some motherly love, Carole.
Read Carole Thorpe’s complete remarks from the August 2 press conference:
In his freshman year in the House of Representatives, Tom Perriello has fit right in as a shiny new cog in the Washington machine, hell-bent to fundamentally transform the United States of America.
The means to this end is a calculated plan for the Federal government to seize unlimited power unto itself while annihilating personal liberty, our free enterprise system, our health care system, our national sovereignty, and indenturing our children and grandchildren to the state through generational debt.
Throughout his first and hopefully only in Congress, Tom Perriello enthusiastically leapt at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s commands to jump like an obedient pup. In the over 1,300 votes he cast as our congressman, he sided with her progressive agenda 90% of the time – and most devastatingly, in favor of three massive pieces of legislation crafted to hand over unprecedented power to our ever-expanding Federal government.
This liberty killing hat trick is the trio of the stimulus bill, Cap and Trade legislation, and government-run health care.
Through we strongly disagree on many issues, Congressman Perriello and I communicate in a cordial manner on a first name basis. In the interest of brevity and with all due respect to him, I will refer to him henceforth by his first name.
Tom voted YES for the $862 billion dollar stimulus bill that was financed with borrowed money. It failed miserably both nationally and in Virginia. Our unfortunate neighbors in the Southside of our congressional district suffer with an unemployment rate hovering around 20%. I doubt they found Tom’s recent buffoonish campaign commercial about job creation the least bit amusing.
Tom voted YES for Cap and Trade legislation, knowing that, in President Obama’s own words, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”. If passed by the Senate, the shockwave will undoubtedly cripple manufacturing, eliminate more jobs, raise the price of every item we purchase, and strap every American family for higher home energy expense. We can only hope that midterm election cowardice will continue to grip Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, deterring him from pushing this wildly unpopular and destructive legislation through the Senate.
And, of course, Tom voted YES for the $1 trillion dollar government-run health care sham that brings us here today. He spent last August in twenty-one town halls, dutifully listening to – but not hearing – the vast majority of his constituents plead with him to represent their wishes and vote NO. Obviously, this was not a priority for Tom. Instead, he patted our collective heads with false empathy and declared he was working to get his vote to a YES.
We were left to clinging to hope that Tom would be unable to reconcile what he said would be the ultimate obstacle to his support. He firmly guaranteed that as a practicing, pro-life Catholic, any inclusion of any Federal funding for abortions would be an automatic deal breaker.
Like so many of our so-called representatives, Tom did not personally read the entire health care bill prior to voting for it, as told to me by one of his staff members when pressed on the telephone. Nancy Pelosi’s pompous, infamous proclamation that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” was good enough for him. Either by devious cunning or incredible naivete, take your pick, Tom took false cover along with Bart Stupak and other pro-life Democrats behind the toothless executive order penned by President Obama, capitulating once again to his socialist agenda.
Clearly, the action taken by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last week which temporarily halted Maryland, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania from funding abortions through their high-risk insurance pools, is evidence enough that the health care reform law even with the President’s executive order did not comprehensively prohibit Federal funding for abortion, as promised.
Indeed, a study by the Congressional Research Service (a branch of the Library of Congress) asserted what many of us knew – that President Obama’s executive order lacked the force of law. Contrary to Tom’s protestations, why else would the Obama administration risk political egg on its face by issuing an unnecessary a new regulation via Secretary Sebelius?
With regards to the worthless executive order, I do not know whether Tom willingly drank partisan Kool-Aid to please his party leadership, or if he irresponsibly voted as an uninformed dupe. It really does not matter to me since, in my personal opinion, either disqualifies him for the privilege of serving as our representative, and the end result by his vote remains the same.
On behalf of the Jefferson Area Tea Party, I join Alex Cortes in calling on Tom to co-sponsor the bipartisan Lipinski-Smith bill. This bill will replace the temporary Sebelius band-aid with a permanent, comprehensive government ban on Federal funding of abortion.
While the JATP takes no position on the issue of abortion, we are compelled to speak as champions for honest, transparent government. We expect our elected officials to read and understand bills completely before they vote on them. We hold our representatives accountable for the promises they make to their constituents. We will excoriate any representative who lacks the conviction of his or her stated principles to reject an empty promise embossed with a Presidential Seal, or demonstrates a lack of critical knowledge for the job – such as in this case that an executive order cannot trump Federal law.
In conclusion, during a meeting on Capitol Hill with members of the Jefferson Area Tea Party on March 16, Tom said of himself and of Congress; “If you don’t tie our hands, we will keep stealing.” Unbelievable, I know…but you can find the videotape on YouTube.com by typing the words “Perriello” and “stealing” into the search field.
Tom Perriello and Nancy Pelosi along with the rest of the 111th Congress have richly earned their current job approval rating of just eleven percent. ELEVEN PERCENT. We need to do much more than “tie the hands” of our thieving representatives. Today, we stand at the crossroads of liberty and tyranny – and our path and the paths of future generations of Americans will be set by the action or inaction we take at the polls this November.
It is time for America to wake up, stand up, and shake up the halls of Congress, purging it of every corrupt, arrogant, hypocritical, incompetent, lying weasel that scurries through its halls and plots to “fundamentally transform” our great country.
It’s one thing to stand for fiscal conservatism and limited governmen, but this speech is poorly reasoned when it’s reasoned at all, and typifies Tea Party rhetoric in that it’s both nutty and nasty.
Perriello, we read, is “an obedient pup,” a corrupt, arrogant, hypocritical, incompetent, lying weasel (but all due respect to him! — we get along!) who votes whichever way Pelosi wants him to. But where is the evidence that he doesn’t honestly share her positions? The stimulus bill (that many conservative economists) supported “failed miserably both nationally and in Virginia.” But how do we know the economy would have rebounded without it? And how do we know economists who think it needed to be larger to succeed are wrong?
Contrary to Tom’s protestations, why else would the Obama administration risk political egg on its face by issuing an unnecessary a new regulation via Secretary Sebelius?
Never mind that “else” and “unnecessary” cancel each other out here. The point not acknowledged is that that the new regulation shows Obama is serious about keeping his promise not to federally fund abortions.
Tom said of himself and of Congress: “If you don’t tie our hands, we will keep stealing.”
Given that moments before he had called stealing a problem and referred to Congress as “they” instead of “we,” it’s clear he’s not admitting anything, but not really even talking about himself. It’s as if a law-abiding man in a family full of crooks had said, “our family has often had trouble with the law,” and you said, “see, he admits he’s a criminal.”
And his approval rating is not 11 percent, of course. He is not Congress, and neither is Pelosi, and the body that has received that rating as a whole includes many conservatives disliked by Democratic and Independent voters represented in that poll. Of course the writer must know this, but never mind, don’t let facts get in the way of a good excoriation.
But of course Thorpe’s mad, because — here’s the nutty part — conspiring liberals want not only to saddle their own kids with huge debt, but to seize “unlimited” power on behalf of government, annihilating personal liberty. Which is an unconscionable thing to do. Except when it restricts abortion.
Thank you, Carole, for your unerring, well reasoned remarks. Yes indeed, it is time for America to wake up and purge the halls of Congress “of every corrupt, arrogant, hypocritical, incompetent, lying weasel that scurries through its halls and plots to ‘fundamentally transform’ our great country.”
Let the good, honest, God fearing, well reasoned citizens of Virginia’s 5th district lead the way to take back our great country this November by defeating pitiful Tom Perriello and his like-minded comrades!
It is possible to be pro-life and yet to believe the abortion question has been settled legally. One of the saddest things about the Religious Right is its notion that people who don’t share its politics by definition aren’t God-fearing. And until you folks grow beyond that, you might win a political battle here or there, but you won’t “take back” our mutually shared (not your own) country. Love your neighbors enough to see the good in them, and they might be open to persuasion.