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So there’s this pud in Congress, Rep. Jared Golden, a first-term Democrat from Maine who was one of only two Democrats in the House to join a Republican effort back in June to repeal Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan from last summer. That repeal bill passed the House and the Senate (with support from Dems Jon Tester, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema), but Biden vetoed it.
If you don’t remember any of that, it’s probably because the Supreme Court shortly afterwards bigfooted the temporary victory by deciding Biden lacked the authority to forgive student loan debt. Biden resolved to try again using a different federal law, and everyone forgot all about that earlier Republican repeal bill. Or they would have, if Rep. Goldenpud hadn’t had a massive hissy fit over some embarrassing reporting. It’s sort of a pity that the Streisand Effect already had a name, because “the Golden Effect” has a real ring to it.
Y’see kids, Golden and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez (D-Washington) — the other Dem who voted to repeal debt forgiveness — are co-chairs of the “Blue Dog Coalition,” a loose affiliation of corporate-friendly “moderate” Dems. The Maine Beacon, a progressive Maine reporting outfit, raised some eyebrows with an August 18 report that shortly after the vote, the Blue Dogs received two donations from interested parties. One $5,000 donation — the maximum allowed — came from the PAC that represents Sallie Mae, the student loan servicing outfits borrowers love to hate. Another for the same amount was from “Career Education Colleges and Universities,” a lobbying firm for for-profit colleges.
Now, that’s pretty embarrassing and looks like Sallie Mae had quidded for some quo from Golden, and at a bargain price too. But it might have just vanished into a folder labeled Maine Democrat Infighting, because $10,000 isn’t a huge amount of money in the grifty world of political funding. It makes a big difference to your average student loan debtor, though — a life-changing one, even!
We’ll never know, because Golden lost his proverbial shit in response to the story, posting an extended whine to Xwitter: (We have added paragraph breaks to the rant, you are welcome.)
Sadly, this is what radical leftist elites are learning about ‘democracy’ these days — silence and destroy anyone who disagrees with your views or goals. I stand by my vote and my opposition to forking out $10,000 to people who freely chose to attend college. They were privileged to have the opportunity, and many left college well-situated to make six-figure salaries for life.
The Twitterati can keep bemoaning their privileged status and demanding handouts all they want, but as far as I’m concerned, if they want free money for college, they can join the Marines and serve the country like I, and so many others, have in the past, and many more will in the future.
If they want a career and hard skills without college debt, they should join a union and enter an apprenticeship. But if they choose to attend college, they can pay back their loans just like working class people pay back home mortgages, car loans, and many other expenses that people choose to take out loans for.
Well yikes, that’s a lot! Golden’s tweet included a link to the Maine Beacon story, but didn’t mention the donations at all, because apparently everyone who wants student debt relief is making six figures, hating the working class (working class people don’t go to college?), and if you want free college you should join the Marines, OK? Or learn a trade though a union, like the famous rhetoricians unions that send you to rhetoric school for free. No? That was just me?
(For all Golden’s talk about class — for which he also has some “definitions” — he seems fine assuming everyone from the working class is fit for plumbing and carpentry and that’s that.)
There’s a case to be made that Golden and Gluesenkamp-Perez represent Republican districts and are toeing a fine line listening to their constituents — but there’s not so much a case for calling your base a bunch of names that just so happen to ape Fox News’s framing. It’s a dick move, by an apparent dick. We’re still glad he won his Trump district congressional race, and we hope he’ll be less of a dick going forward.
Here’s where we also remind you that some of us have a particular animus toward Sallie Mae, since it was among the loan servicers that mis-served borrowers 20 years ago, steering tens of thousands of us (yes me too, I have an animus all right) into forbearances instead of income-based repayment plans, thus piling up extra tens of thousands in interest debt. Since Golden was talking about Biden’s more general debt relief plan, I guess he doesn’t expect me to join the Marines at 61, not even if I get to fight alien bugs.
Even after that outburst, Golden wasn’t satisfied to let sleeping puds lie; yesterday, he engage in some extended score-settling, so he could “continue the conversation.”
Oh lordy, let me see again about enlisting for the Bug Wars. What? They don’t start for another few hundred years, but people still talk about Star Wars then? Damn it.
In his completely unasked-for apologia, Golden tries to explain that his rant wasn’t aimed at everyone who might support student loan forgiveness, heavens no. Instead, he really meant that he was only excoriating those darn “radical leftist elitists,” and he has an extremely narrow definition of who they are too. Golden gripes about people in think tanks and special interest groups, who make lots of money because the “super rich” pay them to promote radical leftist policies like, uh, forgiving as much as $20,000 in loan debt for low-income borrowers. You know how the rich leftists are.
There is SO MUCH butthurt, bad faith score settling in this mess. Again without mentioning the contribution to Blue Dogs R Us, Golden complains that simply because he dared to step out of line, he was “attacked” by an unnamed “political organization funded by difficult-to-trace dark money but with obvious connections to Washington D.C. political networks,” by which we guess he means the little lefty Maine paper, we dunno.
Worse, the baddies “came after me not with a strong defense of the policy it supports, but instead a broadside attack against my character and that of my colleague Marie Gluesenkamp Perez” — again, no mention of the donation. He might not look like a victim of the elitists if he mentioned that.
In any case, we now have a definition of “radical leftist elitists,” who are the only ones Golden was mad at. They are people who “have these main components”:
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a college degree(s),
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work in politics,
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and make a salary that is in the top fifth of wage earners;
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their preferred political tactic for dealing with credible differences of opinion about matters of policy is to lash out with personal attacks questioning someone’s intelligence, motives, or ethics;
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and their operations are often funded through legal, but corrupt, loopholes that allow millionaires and billionaires to funnel unlimited amounts of money into politics without transparency.
Also, their chief weapon is fear. Fear and surprise. And a fanatical devotion to Bernie Sanders. But those are the ONLY Liberal Elites Golden has a problem with. We at Wonkette must be cool, since we’re not making any six figures paid by zillionaires, no matter how mean to Jared Golden we may be.
Crom help us, we’re only a quarter of the way through this. So let’s summarize quickly: He’s also mad at an editorial in the Portland Press-Herald that said he was out of step with the working class, and that’s not fair because Golden is a small business! Or his family was! And also class is a complex topic, but not so complex that Golden can’t be mad at the $125,000 individual cap on loan forgiveness, ignoring the fact that 90 percent of loan forgiveness would have gone to people making less than $75,000 a year.
In conclusion, I have now said more about Jared Golden’s dumb rant than I should have, yet I am still unable to find a good joke for the punchline “On Golden Pud,” so I’m pretty mad about that.
[Fox News / Maine Beacon / Jared Golden Substack / Portland Press-Herald]
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