Meet The Tea Party Medicaid Opponent Candidate – On Medicaid!

Meet Greg Collett of Caldwell, Idaho, who has been exposed as a shameless hypocrite:

A Tea Party candidate for Idaho’s House of Representatives defended himself against allegations of hypocrisy following an NBC News article in which he admitted to signing his entire family up for Medicaid while running on a platform that calls for the dismantling of all government programs.

“I don’t think that the government should be involved in health care or health insurance,” Greg Collett, 41, of Caldwell told NBC News earlier this month.

Collett, a self-employed software developer by trade, went on to note that his ten children — two biological, eight adopted — are all recipients of health insurance through the government’s Medicaid program, and acknowledged that “there are a lot of people out there that’ll cry foul” over the dissonance.

And, indeed, many people did visit Collett’s personal site shortly afterward to ask him what the hell.

And when Collett tried to defend himself on his personal Web site, he ended up shooting himself in the foot.

As Opposing Views helpfully summarizes: “[I]t is okay to take part in programs one opposes as long as one does not ‘support’ those programs.”

It’s worth mentioning that, when it comes to “government-funded public schools,” Collett is a man of his nonsensical word: All of his kids are homeschooled.

That being said, Collett claims the homeschooling is not a product of his opposition to public education, but his unwillingness “to accept the social and moral consequences” of sending his children to a public school.

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.