Last week a New York cartoonist sparked a national controversy by directly relating a rampaging, face-biting monkey to the stimulus package recently signed into law.
Combining these current events in a heavy-handed and insensitive manner, the cartoonist also managed to make little to no sense - had Oliver the chimp really been more involved in the passage of the stimulus bill, the legislation surely would have called for more domestic banana production.
A far more appropriate connection between current events dominating the news cycle in early February would be linking the spending bill to octuplet mom Nadya Suleman. Even the blogosphere-induced names of the two news items, Porkulus and Octomom, both sound like the names of second-rate Spiderman villains.
The stimulus bill has no father, just like our highly visible octuplets. President Barack Obama nurtured this bill and protected it from harm by using up some of his immense political capital, and he will see this bill through a difficult adolescence into the maturity of program implementation. Obama is the momma.
Nobody else in the Democratic leadership has the ability or will to act as a surrogate father to this big piece of legislation.
Even Nancy "Crazy Eyes" Pelosi seems to have backed off and left this whole enchilada to Obama. Congressional Republicans are too busy praying six times a day towards an autographed poster of "Bedtime for Bonzo" to handle fatherly duties.
Octomom just birthed her second batch of lab kids, so her past behavior clearly points to an unsurprising propensity for unfrozen babies. The stimulus package is notable for its bloated size, but it is essentially all of Obama's campaign promises rolled into one bill. Putting shovels into the ground, funneling money into education and bringing up tax rates on the wealthy are three of the main tenets of Obama's stump speeches.
Both Obama and Octomom stayed true to their convictions, be they ideas about the best way to spend a few billion dollars or the relative sanity of having 14 kids and no money.
Obama and Octomom also have both taken a beating in the press over their February babies. Anger has cascaded down on Octomom for her obvious insanity and complete inability to even fake sanity for a few precious seconds, culminating in her receiving death threats. This is clearly wrong - the Supreme Court outlawed executions of the mentally retarded in 2002.
Obama, on the other hand, is catching flak for spending a bunch of China's money and taxing the rich to pay for it. Governors of five states have said that they will refuse some or all of the stimulus money allocated to them because of the attached rules that force the states to permanently raise taxes to pay back some of the funding. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Sunday that it is like "spending a dollar to get a dime."
If Louisiana and those other states leave that money on the table, I can think of at least one mother of 14 who may be looking for some love - and a little extra cash.
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears on Tuesdays.
