It didn’t take eight years to understand the hypocritical charlatan that is Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, but it was his last State of the State speech that laid it out most plainly.
The annual address by the governor to the start of the regular legislative session was larded up with the typical assortment of misleading statements, either because these didn’t have the proper context or implied something false. As examples of the former, Edwards proclaimed how the state’s all-time low unemployment rate equated to more Louisianans working than ever – but not mentioning the unemployment rate is at a historic low largely because of depopulation (the state having 91,000 fewer residents than when he took office, likely largely economic refugees) and the labor force participation rate being at a 45-year low (absent the pandemic period), 1.4 points lower than in 2016 and in the nation’s bottom ten, leaving the state with almost 35,000 fewer nonfarm jobs than six years ago. And as for the latter, he placed “climate change” and “Storms are getting stronger and more frequent” in the same breath to imply a relationship, when in fact storms haven’t changed in severity or frequency in recent times.
At a few points, however, he did outright lie. One he has often repeated cropped back up on this occasion, that because of Medicaid expansion he triggered – which now costs state taxpayers directly, not even counting the extra federal taxes they pay for it, $451 million a year – “we haven’t had a single rural hospital closure. Not. One.” In fact, even before he ran for reelection that was demonstrably false.
This rhetoric invited the typical hypocrisy. Right off the bat as a challenge his administration needed to surmount he spoke of a “national reckoning over racial injustice and discriminatory policing” – this from the guy who obfuscated and lied about his and the state police’s role surrounding the death and investigation of black motorist Ronald Greene. He asserted changes he had forced upon the state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program – relying on a deeply flawed advocacy report bolstering his view – that if reversed would take money away local government efforts to fund public safety stood in marked contrast to his own budget requests that do the same in that he refuses to use extra revenues to pay down the state’s unfunded accrued liabilities in pensions that would free up money for local governments to use to fund public safety.
Worst of all, at one point he introduced a restaurant owner who battled to keep in business after devastating storms – after Edwards nearly did to him the same a year earlier through unnecessary restrictions Edwards alone imposed during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. As bad as Edwards’ economic management of the state has been, his worst legacy will be decisions made locking down Louisiana that ultimately cost more lives than they saved.
To this obvious record of failure after failure, distortion after distortion necessary to avoid drawing attention to that Edwards naturally pursued in the speech. But the most nauseating aspect to it all came from the hyper-sanctimony in which he delivered it, a virtuoso display of his innate arrogance and obtuseness which seems to make him blissfully ignorant that to informed and thinking people willing to step out of ideological silos he comes off as a total fraud.
Perhaps nowhere in the presentation did this become more apparent than in his remarks about abortion, given the background of several references to religious faith guiding his agenda. Behold a breathtaking display of cynicism, if not outright self-deception:
I simply do not know how we as a state can tell a young girl or any victim of rape or incest that she must be forced by law to carry her rapist’s baby to term, regardless of the impact on her own physical or mental health, the wishes of her parents, or the medical judgment of her physician. After all, rape and incest exceptions protect crime victims.
Notice which victims gets left out of this jeremiad, without a single concern for their well-being, who pay with their lives just because those began as a result of criminal behavior: the unborn. As horrible as rape and incest are with the physical and mental damage that occurs and lasts at least nine months – much as other crime victims must suffer often their entire lives due to having been shot, stabbed, struck, or made permanently disabled – two wrongs don’t make a right by aborting an innocent person.
And if Edwards had any doubt about that, he can check on tenets of the Catholic faith he parades about on these occasions and wears like a badge when it comes to discussing certain policy areas. It is clear and unambiguous:
Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. The inalienable rights of the person must be recognized and respected by civil society and the political authority …. These human rights depend neither on single individuals nor on parents.
It is one thing for a politician to support exceptions to protecting life, or even to discard protecting life at all. That is a judgment for the electorate to make whether that agenda becomes turned into policy. It is another entirely to speak out of both sides of one’s mouth, claiming a religious affiliation as a political tool yet when it proves inconvenient sacrificing it on the altar of a political agenda considered more important. The sooner Louisianans are rid of this tiresome foolishness, the better.
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