Today marks the start of a weekly column on this site by Carter Bundy. If you missed last week’s announcement, read it by clicking here.
By Carter Bundy
So Heath has been kind enough to offer me a regular space on his blog. Sweet. First dilemma: come up with a catchy name for the column. Credit has to go entirely to the girlfriend on this, who thought using a variation of Bugs’ many famous lines like “I knew I should have taken a left at
For the record, I have no affiliation with Warner Brothers or rabbits, although my dog seems to enjoy chasing them (always unsuccessfully, and more recently with a leash) in the petroglyphs. I do, however, have a very strong affinity for Bugs’ character, which actually makes for a decent segue to introduce myself and give you a general sense of what to expect here.
Bugs is a liberal. Think about it. He’s obviously pro-environment, except when he paints those fake tunnels on rocks. He’s basically non-violent, except in self-defense. He always lets his nemeses use the violence first, although if Bugs can help it backfire on them, well, that’s just the way it goes. But Bugs doesn’t, to my recollection, launch pre-emptive strikes. As far as I can tell, he’s also a vegetarian except when faced with starvation, at which point those accompanying him may start to look like hot dogs or hamburgers, depending on general body type. A huge percentage of vegetarians are liberal, according to a scientific poll of my one vegetarian friend.
Bugs is smart (sorry, conservatives, but your chosen leader has set the general perception of your collective IQs back more than a few points), remains calm in the middle of crises, has a sense of humor, uses common sense and has a basic understanding of how people react to things to figure out solutions (see again: current GOP leadership). As much as anything, Bugs likes to question authority. You won’t see that out of the Young Republican automatons.
In fairness, conservatives would be right to point out that neither Gore nor Kerry was a barrel-of-monkeys kind of guy. Hey, I didn’t say the analogy was perfect.
If Bugs could do one thing well, it was seeing things from multiple perspectives. He played an entire baseball team by himself – including pitcher, catcher and all outfield positions. He hunted rabbits with Elmer and Daffy, and regularly lined up to eat rabbit stew. The rabbit Sean Hannity (or was that rabid?) would have called him a traitor to his species. And Bugs was the most versatile cross-dresser this side of J. Edgar Hoover. Seeing things from all sides is a distinctively liberal trait, and Bugs had it in spades.
Supreme Court conservatives don’t have that trait
Unfortunately, the five conservatives on the Supreme Court – including both Alito and Roberts – don’t have that trait at all. The big bad five just ruled last week in Ledbetter v. Goodyear that a woman’s well-documented pay-discrimination case had to be thrown out, even though she’d won on the merits below, because she hadn’t filed within 180 days of the discrimination. She’d been discriminated against for 19 years, with each and every paycheck and smaller raise.
But somehow conservatives found a way to side with the employer and rule that it was only the initial decision to discriminate – at the very beginning of her employment – that could constitute an act of discrimination. If I didn’t let you into my hotel because of your skin color for the last 19 years, I’d think each of those cases would’ve constituted discrimination, regardless of when the policy was decided.
So conservatives decided that it’s OK to continue to discriminate, as long as you’ve been doing it for a while. I’m pretty sure that even Newt Gingrich wouldn’t have intended an anti-discrimination law to be read that way. And these five guys went to law school? Most ironic of all, Justice Thomas was once head of the EEOC. Awesome.
Did any of you know exactly what your co-workers made when you first started at your job and were trying to figure out how to file TPS reports and how many pieces of flair you had to wear?
The four liberals, on the other hand, understood that the woman couldn’t possibly have been expected to have uncovered a massive pay discrimination plan, much less mustered up the guts, money and lawyers to challenge it, in her first few months on the job.
At this point, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would like to extend a hearty thanks to all the Nader voters in
P.S. – I chose a roadrunner for the column’s logo because it has better hair than I do. In addition, lots of the same liberalisms that apply to Bugs apply to the world’s most famous roadrunner. I’m a sucker for underdogs being pursued to the ends of the earth by the weapons of the Acme Corporation.
Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in