Mr. Simpson Has a Cow

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

What are we to make of Alan Simpson, the co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission, who recently referred to Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits”?

Personally, I would love for us to have a national cow with that sort of milk-giving capacity. But Simpson, who gets very impatient with people who want to preserve current Social Security benefits, did not mean it as a compliment. Now, his remark is getting a lot of attention, and that is only partly because the rest of the news has been so depressing that Bristol Palin’s rumored agreement to compete on “Dancing With the Stars” was a high point of the week.

Simpson, 78, is a former Republican senator known for his outspokenness — he once called the American Association of Retired Persons “the greedy geezers of America.” In appointing him co-chairman of the president’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the White House broke an important political rule, which is to keep away from anyone who considers himself a colorful old codger.

Colorful codgers can be a welcome diversion in mediocre situation comedies, but you do not want one to be the public face of your deficit reduction commission. He might do something crazy, like e-mailing an activist for older American women, to accuse her of “babbling into the vapors,” then make disparaging remarks about well-endowed dairy animals and conclude with: “Call when you get honest work!”

(More here.)

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