Reid: Budget cuts could end Cowboy Poetry Festival

Brokeback Harry Reid

Washington DC, Mar 8, 2011. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, is so upset about Republican spending cuts that he's brought out the big guns:

Accusing the GOP of being so heartless they would de-fund the National Endowment for the Humanities, which underwrites a cowboy poetry festival in his state.

In the middle of his tirade against House Republicans’ “mean-spirited” budget bill on the Senate floor Tuesday, the Senate Majority Leader lamented that the GOP’s proposed budget cuts would eliminate the annual “cowboy poetry festival” in his home state of Nevada.

Brokeback Harry said:

“The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1, eliminates National Public Broadcasting. It eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts. These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.”

Cowboy Poets

As the Daily Caller's Mary Katharine Ham puts it, "John Boehner's America is a land in which cowboys would be forced into back-alley poetry recitations."

Just keep this in perspective when people talk about which party is willing to reach a compromise. One party levels ad hominem attacks over cutting funding to poetry festivals. The other... wants to cut funding to poetry festivals.