Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., is not worth two posts in a row from any but the lowliest of bloggers, so here comes #2 on the whimpering weasel. He went to the same college as I and it's sort of embarrassing. Here he is putting his best foot forward on his website:
Erik Paulsen represents Minnesota's Third District in the US House of Representatives; a district made up of the western suburbs of Minneapolis. Paulsen is serving his first term in the House of Representatives with a heavy focus on job creation, fiscal discipline, veterans’ issues and constituents service.
Paulsen is a member of the House Financial Services Committee where he has been a champion of fiscal responsibility with a focus on greater transparency and accountability of taxpayer dollars. During his first months in office he successfully passed legislation to create broad authority for a Special Inspector General to oversee bailout spending through the Troubled Asset Relief Program as well as a bill he authored to strengthen small businesses hampered by the recession. He is also co-sponsoring legislation that will provide reform for taxpayers and small business while creating a strong economic climate for job growth.
Alas, the first two grafs of his autobiography are representative of the whole. Perhaps while in college the lessons of freshman composition were not a heavy focus of his. I like how referring to himself in the third person gives the piece a fake journalistic feel, as if it's the straight dope instead of just him trying to brag about airy nothing. Have you ever noticed, when reading a piece of really terrible writing, how often the bloviations tend to obscure the bullshit? Take the phrase "he successfully passed legislation." First time through, he earns the taunt: "As opposed to unsuccessfully passed legislation, you blockhead?" But second time through you notice that "unsuccessfully" does serve a subliterate rhetorical function. If you take it out, the sentence is pared down, with the result that the reader, instead of gliding along mindlessly on puffy cumulus, is called back to the ground, where it will likely occur to him that Paulsen, an obscure back-bencher of the minority party in a congress of 435, could not himself have passed anything. For small blessings we should all be thankful.
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