Wednesday, November 03, 2010

What's Wrong With This Picture?


Let me get this straight. Americans are very unhappy with the state of the economy, the level of federal debt, and fiscal irresponsibility in general. The GOP has spent much of the past two years doing 3 things: (1) blocking the Obama administration's attempts to address these issues: (2) diluting to virtual ineffectiveness that which it could not block; (3) lying about the results when the dilutions didn't work and administration initiatives actually did a lot of good. Yet voters yesterday overwhelmingly gave the reins back to the GOP, largely on the grounds that "the country was moving in the wrong direction." Huh?!?!

I take no comfort in the fact that most of the craziest of the crazies (Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Sharon Angle, Christine O'Donnell, Carl Palladino, and Joe Miller--though that last is not yet official) went down to sound defeats. A full third of the voters yesterday still voted for those textbook examples of nuttiness.

And the official pronouncements of those GOP members poised to take over say with one voice that their first goal is to repeal the health care bill, the one they derisively have named "Obamacare." A bill which, admittedly, most people hate when asked about it as a whole, but which, when asked about it feature by feature, an overwhelming majority of people like.

The financial bailouts (which people say they hated and also cite as a reason for the way they voted yesterday) happened under President George W. Bush, REPUBLICAN, but voters yesterday also cited bailouts as one of the reasons they voted for the GOP to retake control of the US House of Representatives. Said voters also hated the alleged governmental take-overs of the US auto industry, but Ford didn't participate, and both GM and Chrysler have roared back to health, and the interest the government bought in those companies is already being sold, the companies having paid off their debts--ahead of schedule.

The level of federal debt owes at least a trillion dollars of its total to President Bush's (and a GOP-controlled Congress's) war spending, which the GOP kept off the books. It pre-existed the Obama administration, but because President Obama kept one of his promises by putting that debt back on the books--where it belonged in the first place--Obama is being blamed for excessive spending.

We are in the worst economic crisis we've seen since the days of the Great Depression, yet the stimulus package, as watered down and weak as the GOP could make it, has kept things from being much, much worse . . . and yet the perception is that the stimulus "failed." Or so the GOP keeps saying. If a lie is repeated long enough, it seems no longer to be a lie, I guess. So I say again, "Huh?!?!"

Wherever H.L. Mencken is, he's laughing his head off. I'm not laughing, however. I'm crying. We've just given the car keys back to the idiots who drove us into the ditch in the first place. The late 19th century has been dubbed "The Gilded Age." I suspect our current time may go down in history as "The Stupid Age."

Monday, November 01, 2010

Rest In Peace

Ted Sorensen, Nebraskan, attorney, counselor and speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, witness to history, has died at the age of 82. May he rest in peace. He embodied the most famous line from JFK's inaugural address: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Indeed, it has long been the common understanding that he, not JFK, actually penned it. Modest and wise, however, when asked directly about that he never lied, but he never said "yes," either. He pointed out that Kennedy made the decisions about what his administration and its policies would be, and Kennedy authored the speech. So Sorensen admitted his role without actually admitting it.

Such understatement is typical of the best Nebraska has to offer, and it's one of the main reasons I so like living here even though it's one of the reddest of the so-called "red states." I highly recommend Sorensen's biography, Counselor, to anyone who wants to gain insight into not just American politics, but into the entire world, especially the world of the early 1960s. It was a vastly different place from the world of today. Yet people of good and noble character are as needed now as they ever have been.

Mr. Sorensen, you will be missed. Requiescat in pace.