I on the World

Okay, I admit it.  I donated to, campaigned in favor of, and voted for Barack Obama, and I’m not exactly thrilled about it so far.

He promised transparency.  I guess that meant he was going to have the windows at the White House washed on a regular basis.  He promised an end to lobbyists in the White House.  I guess he meant that lovely white house you can see when you’re heading down I-95 past Emporia, Virginia.  He promised the dog he would get for his kids would be a shelter mutt.  I guess he meant some other kids.  He promised to close Guantanamo.  I guess he meant after he found another galaxy that would take all the detainees.  He promised to reverse Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  I guess he meant in the Irish military.  He promised to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.  I guess he must have been talking about some other defense project.  He promised to end the war in Iraq.  I guess he meant just before he comes up for reelection.  He promised a whole new focus on clean energy.  I guess he meant after drilling the remaining life out of the planet.  He promised there would be no place for torture in America.  I guess he meant after he exonerated everyone who had anything to do with it.  He promised health care reform.  I guess he meant health care revision, where the people get screwed and the insurance companies get richer.  And most of all, he promised change – change in the way Washington works.  Oops!  I just blinked.  Did I miss it?  Granted, there are limitations to what one person can do, but I don’t know whether I’d want to vote for him again.

The problem is, I look across at the republicans, and I see. . .nothing.  No ideas, no solutions, no leadership.  I see the token black head of the RNC, who is only marginally less than incompetent.  I see the House leader and his runner-up (John Boner and Eric Can’t-er) who are so devoid of character and substance that I wonder how they keep getting elected.  I see the Senate leader and his sidekick (Mitch McCon-ell and John Kil) whose only mission in life seems to be putting an uppity president in his place by just saying no.  And I see intellectual midgets like Palin and Bachmann urging a group of undereducated, under-informed, unintelligent teabags into the kind of hatred and violence I thought had died with the Sixties.

Show me a leader who cares more about the people of this country than lining his own pockets.  Show me a leader who speaks for all Americans, not just Wall Street or Main Street or Rich Street or White Street.  Show me a leader who can take us from the brink of disaster to redemption – because that’s exactly where we are.  Show me a leader who understands that.  I’ll vote for him.

In Washington, that is.

Except, of course, when the Republicans are in the majority.  Then the majority rules.  They rule very poorly for the American people, and very well for their special interests.  But they rule.

The Democrats, on the other hand, can’t rule at all.  As the minority, when threatened with the nuclear option, they caved.  As the majority, when it’s clear the Republicans are simply being obstructionists, they caved.

When the only thing a politician thinks about is reelection rather than representation, there is no governing.

All in all, a dismal failure for the American people.

Whatever you might think of the recent SCOTUS ruling on campaign contributions, one thing is abysmally clear — the collapse of America is coming closer and closer.  Why, you ask?  Because, without a true functioning government — and in this country, that means a government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people — there is no bottom to corpocracy, to greed, to corruption, to disaster.

And the sad truth is, it’s so easy to fix.  And the people who shudder at the very mention of campaign finance reform are, sadly, those who thrive on corpocracy, greed and corruption.  And, tragically, many of them are your senators and congresspeople.  They like the special interests.  They like the special attention they receive.  They like the money that pours into their coffers.  They didn’t seek public office to give a hoot about their constituents — they sought public office to enrich themselves on the backs of their constituents,  to make career changes that would, one way or another, set them up for life.  The worst of the worst at it get caught out and kicked out.  The rest get away with it.  Are there some good ones in the bunch?  I’m sure there are, and I can probably name them.  But they’re too few to make any real difference.

Don’t agree?  Okay, let’s put it to the test.  A couple of years ago, I suggested a simple, winning solution to my own congressman.  I suggested that a designated sum of money be transferred from every taxpayer’s tax return to a national, interest-bearing election account, and then proportionally allotted to every legitimate candidate for national office every two years.  That’s it.  No other contributions accepted.  At any time.  For any reason.

Just think what that would do to clean up the dirt that is the American government today.  Our senators and congresspeople would be beholden to no one but their constituents.  They could admit that global warming does indeed exist.  They could hasten the planet on the path to real sustainability.  They could tell health insurance companies where they could take their business if they didn’t treat their people right.  They could suggest to pharmaceutical companies that gouging their constituents was not okay.  They could tell big banks and Wall Street that their heydays were over.  They could perhaps then honestly claim the moral integrity to lead the world.  What a novel concept!

Oh yes, and what did my congressperson do in response to my suggestion?  He ignored it.

. . .the only problem is — what we have is a joke.  A big, sad, expensive joke on the American people.  Oh, they’ll try to sell it all right, as hard as they can.  They’ll try to tell you about all the money it will save and all the people it will help.  They’ll pat themselves on the back and wax eloquent like the carnival barkers they really are, shilling for the carnival owners — the health care industry.  But don’t be fooled.

Remember all the parrots, reciting that wonderful-sounding phrase “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”?  Well, now we get what they really meant — “Don’t let the good be the enemy of taking whatever we can get, and selling it to the American people as though it was something.”

Maybe it’s time that this country went the way of ancient Greece and ancient Rome and all the others who imploded from their own greed and corruption and selfishness and stupidity.

I’m constantly amused by those who think they are somehow demeaning Democrats by insisting that they represent the Democrat Party.  Have you heard them?  The southern dimwits, I call them, because they all seem to come from that part of the country.  Now I suppose you could say that they represent the undereducated class of Americans.  But what they really represent, sadly, is the new face of the Republic Party.

Reforming health care in this country is not difficult.  It’s simply a matter of bringing quality affordable health care to every man woman and child in America.  One does that by ignoring the pressures from the industry and doing what’s right for the people.

Which  was why I couldn’t believe that any reasonably intelligent population would actually oppose reforming our health care system until I saw a crowd of people lining up for a Sarah Palin book signing, and then reality hit me – maybe the error in my thinking was that we have a reasonably intelligent population in this country.

I’ve been trying for over a year now to figure out what Sarah Palin’s appeal is to the people who flock to her without question or qualm.  She is, after all, an intellectual lightweight, totally lacking in any intellectual curiosity.  Despite attending five colleges, she is abysmally undereducated.  And on every single issue that matters, she is nothing if not grossly ill-informed.  I believe I’ve finally figured it out.  The people who flock to her without question or qualm do so precisely because she is their peer, or their superior.

Let’s see.  It was perfectly okay for the Bush administration to try terrorists in civilian courts.  But now, it isn’t.  Now it’s the rallying cry of frightened weaklings.  What changed?  It’s only too obvious.

Here we have Mr. Cheney, who for eight long years disgraced the office of vice president in every possible way when he held it, accusing the sitting president of treason.  It would be funny, if it weren’t so odious. What Cheney is really afraid of, in bringing the terrorists to NY for open trial, isn’t that we will give them a platform for their cause.  Rather, it’s that we might give them a platform from which they can expose all the ugly secrets of his torture regime.  Crawl back under your rock, Mr. Cheney.  The world is blessed by your departure from the White House.

Personally, I’m not particularly enthralled with Mr. Obama, or with the spineless majority.  But when I look at the spokespeople of the Republican Party and see the likes of Cheney and daughter and Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and Carrie Prejeans and Virginia Foxx and Michael Steele, spinelessness actually begins to seem like a virtue.

I don’t know why I just assume that the people we elect to public office are the best and the brightest this country has to offer.  I guess I was brought up that way.  So it always knocks me back on my heels when I come across what I still call an aberration – someone who so clearly does not belong in office that it screams of incomprehensibility.  Such a person is a congresswoman from Minnesota named Michelle Bachmann.

It’s not that she has the command of a cockroach, or the tolerance of a gnat, or the intellectual capacity of a flea.  It’s the fact that she’s been elected to office more than once that makes it not so much what it says about her as what it says about the people who voted for her!  Because, unless she’s found a way to stuff ballot boxes without being caught, there’s actually a district somewhere in the bowels of Minnesota that is populated by some very stupid people, to put it mildly.  Another gift to the Democrats that keeps on giving.

Come on, liberals, ease up, lay off.  Liz Cheney can’t help being Dick’s daughter. So she’s stuck with a father who was one of the worst vice presidents in history – she had no choice in the matter.  So she’s following in his footsteps – she doesn’t know any better.  So she got her State Department job out of nepotism and failed at every level – she was in over her head.  So she flat-out lies about everything she can think of – she had the best role model in the world.  Hey, with folks like Liz Cheney speaking for the Republican Party, Democrats should be thrilled.  So give her a break.

In the interests of full disclosure, let me state that I voted for Barack Obama for President, and contributed to his campaign.  Not because I had anything in particular against John McCain, other than his totally irresponsible choice of a vice-presidential candidate, but because I had come to recognize that Dick Cheney and George Bush had headed one of the worst, if not the worst, administrations in the history of our county.  I concluded it was time for a change.  Not necessarily the kind of change Mr. Obama was campaigning on, but change in general.  You know, like a clean sweep.

I am now beginning to wonder what on earth I was thinking of.  Because the last nine months have shown, if nothing else, that politics is politics, no matter what party is in power.  Mr. Obama is no beacon of light or breath of fresh air.  He is a charming, articulate politician, who did what he had to do to get elected, and is now proceeding to do whatever he believes he must do to get reelected.

And therein lies the problem with government.  People elected to public office are generally focused on one thing and one thing only – getting reelected.  Some of them are also focused on lining their coffers with corporate interest dollars and/or securing their futures as lobbyists once they leave office.  Few of them are particularly focused on doing what they were elected to do – represent the people.

In the past eight years, we have spent an estimated three trillion dollars, and still counting, on two useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we cannot win and will not win, but we can’t find a way to pay for quality, affordable health insurance for every American?

The bills making their way through the House and Senate are jokes, nothing more than page after page of watered down words that translate into giveaways to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, engineered by congresspeople bought and paid for by said industries, and a president who campaigned on health care reform and a strong public option and holding said industries accountable, but has more recently spent his time in closed-door sessions with members of said industries, making assurances that the status quo will not be significantly disturbed.

In the past year alone, we have given away some twenty-four trillion dollars to banks who engaged in practices that make Bernie Madoff look like a nobody.  With foxes like Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernanke in charge of the hen houses, we will never see most of that money again, but we can’t find a way to pay for quality, affordable health care for every American?

Is this what we elected Barack Obama to do — steal from the poor and give to the rich?

Give ma a break!