How About A Research Grant To Study Senile Politicians?

Every now and then some people might need a reminder as to why they were not exactly enthusiastic supporters of Senator John McCain during last year's presidential election. I frankly knew he was in a great deal of trouble when he lost more than one fourth (27%) of Kentucky Republican voters in the Kentucky GOP presidential primary, even though he technically had the Republican nomination sewed up by the time the primary was held.

Here was a man who supported the "bail-out" of Wall Street and the banking industry, making a big show of suspending his campaign in order to go to the Senate in order to work for passage of the TARP legislation, and doing all of this over the fierce objections of a large portion of the Republican Party base.

Yet, throughout the campaign, he made a big deal out of the most insignificant amounts of money ear-marked for what he called "pork-barrel spending projects"-even though as was pointed out numerous times, including by myself, these earmarks (and granted, a great many of them were indefensible) in total amounted to roughly one percent of the entire federal budget.

Nor were all of them tantamount to wasteful spending. Although undoubtedly many of them were largess from the pockets of tax-payers distributed to targeted districts by elected representatives eager to shore up their support among a particular segment of voters, it is nevertheless just as true that many of them were economic boons to their areas. Or, they answered some other pressing need. At the very least, it put tax dollars back into districts from which they had been taken.

One case in point is the recent grant to study the effects of methamphetamine use on human sexuality.

Now, on the face of it, it would seem like it would be almost too easy to deride such a grant as an example of wasteful government spending. After all, why would one need to inject laboratory rats with methamphetamine in order to determine what we already know? Yeah, meth makes you horny and tends to erase whatever sexual inhibitions you might otherwise possess. There's a pretty good chance it might well turn you, quite literally, into a fucking fool.

So goes the objections voiced by John McCain and Tom Coburn, another Republican Senator, from Oklahoma, over this grant to Mary K. Holder, a grad student from the University of Maryland.

Only that is not the impetus behind the research. The actual reason-

Mary K. Holder, the Baltimore graduate student who received the research grant from a unit of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, said she hoped that her findings might be helpful in treating meth abuse. Holder said in her grant application that the study would explore "the molecular underpinnings" of meth-induced sexual behavior and would use immunocytochemistry and other advanced techniques to examine the drug's impact on brain cells in rats.

John McCain of course is a doddering old fool, who should be and largely has been overlooked. Tom Coburn is a different matter. This is a physician who should know better.

True, you can make a case that the federal government should not be involved in doling out taxpayer dollars for research that could easily be initiated by the private sector.

By the same token, you can just as easily, and with great justification, make the case that methamphetamine is a national problem that crosses state lines, adding to poverty, crime, addiction, and an increased illegitimate birth rate. You can also say it is potentially a national security problem. I know just from my own experience what a devastating problem the scourge of methamphetamine is and can be. It has devastated families in rural Kentucky, plagued entire communities, and been an overall detriment to the state's economy.

True, you can make the case, perhaps, that the grant money should not have come from the stimulus money. If that is the case, then make that case. It is really disingenuous to use political grandstanding and rhetorical deviousness to gain political points at the expense of what could be a valuable research project that could, hopefully at some point in the future, lead to a treatment for the addiction to the scourge of meth.

Not just in one small congressional area, but throughout the entire US. And the cost? The amount we are referring to for this horrendous "pork-barrel project"?

$28,900.00

This kind of picayune nonsense is exactly the reason large segments of voters looked at John McCain as though he were some senile old fool complaining about the cost of peanuts in the face of an avalanche of debt.

Coburn's position, on the other hand, aside from the aspect of pure political posturing, is simply incomprehensible. There are myriads of other examples of true government waste and bureaucracy he could and should be fighting. This is, at the very least, an indefensible waste of time.

And money.