He’s either supremely confident in the stupidity of his constituents or he’s suffering from dementia. Perhaps it’s a little of each, insofar as he’s a liberal and therefore easily capable of not only saying idiotic things but then defending his idiotic comments with another self-destructive barrage of idiocy. Welcome to the wacky universe of Alan Grayson (D-FL-o8), whose legislative district coincidentally includes Disney World.

Barack Obama carried District 8 by 52% - the same margin by which Grayson prevailed over incumbent Republican Ric Keller, who broke a pledge not to run for a fifth term. It was not a good year for the Republican Party, which received a serious drubbing in the 2006 mid-terms by voters furious with the GOP for wandering away from its Reaganite roots. Unfortunately, the RNC still could make no sense of the tea leaves and persisted in pandering to the middle way. The Republican Presidential candidate was an uninspiring RINO, whose one-note Vietnam POW samba was wearing thin on even the true believers of the party. Had McCain not chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, his loss on November 4 would have been one for the electoral history books.

Grayson - who is a self-proclaimed “progressive” and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus - campaigned as a crusader against military contractor fraud and won by a narrow margin; he actually lost three of the four counties in the district to his opponent - although he carried Orange County (home of Orlando) by a margin of 55% to 45%, giving him a scant 13,360 vote edge over Keller.

The bottom line here is that Grayson didn’t so much win the election as the GOP - in the person of Ric Keller - lost it, just as they lost the White House in the person of John McCain.

And now Grayson - like Barack Hussein Obama - is showing his true colors: he’s a flamingly liberal statist. So what did he say that was so idiotic?

Heh…where do I begin? I suppose we can start with his comments directed against radio talker Rush Limbaugh earlier this year:

“Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1% of what he wanted us to do, then we’d all need pain killers.”

It gets better. When asked to apologize for the harshness of his rhetoric, Grayson doubled down on the nasty gambit:

“I’m sorry Limbaugh called for harsh sentences for drug addicts while he was a drug addict. I’m also sorry that he’s bent on seeing America fail. And I’m sorry that Limbaugh is one sorry excuse for a human being.”

For one who claims to be so “progressive” in his thinking, Grayson is remarkably ignorant when it comes to differentiating between addiction and dependence. I know whereof I speak because, like Limbaugh, I developed a dependence on opiates after my near fatal head-on collision in 2005. I took opiates not to get high but to keep from going into withdrawal, an agonizingly hellish condition that I wish on nobody. It’s a terrible thing to become dependent on a drug for no purpose other than maintaining stability and normalcy. It’s a terrible thing to feel that awful, horrible craving and hold out for as long as possible, shivering and shaking and sweating a cold sweat with no other thought in mind than “the pill.” Thanks to the intercession of Dr. Richard Schaller and a miracle drug called “suboxone,” I overcame the dependence but, to this day, must avoid opiate-based pain killers.

I know the horror of Limbaugh’s existence after he developed a dependence on opiates. Grayson, alas, knows only the horror of his own existence as an ignorant and heartless liberal who, the other day, drove off the cliff:

“It’s my duty and pride tonight to be able to announce exactly what the Republicans plan to do for health care in America… It’s a very simple plan. Here it is. The Republican health care plan for America: “don’t get sick.” If you have insurance don’t get sick, if you don’t have insurance, don’t get sick; if you’re sick, don’t get sick. Just don’t get sick. … If you do get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: “die quickly.”

Actually, that’s the Democrat plan for the elderly if Obamacare ever becomes a reality. The Republican plan (at least my Republican plan) calls for life, not death - unless by death you mean an end to the Reign of Terror currently being conducted by trial lawyers.

Outraged by Grayson’s slander, Republicans called for an apology. Once again, he doubled down:

“I would like to apologize, I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.”

He then cited a Harvard Study that claimed 44,000 Americans die each year because they have no health insurance. If we are to take this study at face value and compare that number with the 45 million people who supposedly have no health insurance coverage we see that a grand total of 0.00098% of the uninsured population perished for no reason other than the lack of insurance coverage. The percentage of the total population? 0.00015%.

The final number of 44,000 is not even an actual number - it’s a projection based on the reults of the study conducted on 9,004 individuals. The researchers themselves caution:

Our study has several limitations. NHANES III assessed health insurance at a single point in time and did not validate self-reported insurance status. We were unable to measure the effect of gaining or losing coverage after the interview. Point-in-time uninsurance is associated with subsequent uninsurance. Intermittent insurance coverage is common and accelerates the decline in health among middle-aged persons. Among the near elderly,
point-in-time uninsurance was associated with significant decline in overall health relative to those with private insurance. Earlier population-based surveys that did validate insurance status found that between 7% and 11% of those initially recorded as being uninsured were misclassified. If present, such misclassification might dilute the true effect of uninsurance in our sample.

So much for the study. So much, also for the “holocaust,” not the best word for a Florida congressman to use so flippantly and stupidly.

The National Republican Congressional Committee summed up Grayson’s comments succinctly: “This is an unstable man who has come unhinged. The depths to which Alan Grayson will sink to defend his indefensible comments know no bounds.”

Indeed. Grayson’s political days are very precisely numbered. They will end next year, either with his defeat in the Democrat primary or his defeat in the general election in November.