Let's take a break from the Obama/Cenk wars to point out something that is quite obvious.
Our congress is being led by amateurs.
One side is clearly afraid of standing up to a political party that has gone so far to the right, that today's Conservative makes Archie Bunker look like George McGovern.
And that other side, well, when your political party is littered with theocrats, randians, racists, and war-mongers, you deserve to be called wackos. The "Let's get our civil" folks might think it's not cool to call them such, but when you were willing to shut down the Government because of Planned Parenthood, people should reserve the right to call you insane.
What we've witnessed the last few years is that if people are cynical towards Government, they have every right to be so. And, no I'm not some anti-Government Right-Wing nutjob who utters "Big Guvmint" like if I had tourettes. But what has happened is that the people we've elected to office are either dumb, or tools for corporate power.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a column that will be published in Sunday's New York Times, stating that the halls of the United States Congress are filled with children. If there are any adults left in Washington, please direct them to me and Mr. Kristof because we sure can't find any:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
It’s unclear where the adults are, but they don’t seem to be in Washington. Beyond the malice of the threat to shut down the federal government, averted only at the last minute on Friday night, it’s painful how vapid the discourse is and how incompetent and cowardly our leaders have proved to be. A quick guide:
Democrats excoriated Republicans for threatening to shut down the government, but this mess is a consequence of the Democrats’ own failure to ensure a full year’s funding last year when they controlled both houses of Congress.
That’s when the budget should have been passed, before the fiscal year began on Oct. 1. But the Democrats were terror-stricken at the thought of approving spending bills that Republicans would criticize. So in gross dereliction of duty, the Democrats punted.
The last two paragraphs illustrate the point that I made about the Democratic party. And that is they're seriously terrified of being label as big spending, big taxing liberals that they're willing to commit an amateurish move by punting on funding the budget when the fiscal year began on Oct 1, 2010. And because of that you get a budget that is at best, shitty.
But Mr. Kristof doesn't just take the Democratic party to the woodshed, no he saves some of the best for the hypocrites in the Republican party. In my opinion you have to be a downright mean son of a bitch for wanting to defund planned parenthood because 3 percent is devoted to abortions. Yet, the Hyde Amendment has banned federal funding for abortions, but Conservatives don't like the idea of "Planned" next to "Parenthood." But Kristof points out a hypocrisy with the Abortion peacocks of the Republican party. He says that the plan to defund "Planned Parenthood" and "The United Nations Population Fund" would not only cause more abortions, but result in women dying while giving birth:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
In the United States, publicly financed family planning prevented 1.94 million unwanted pregnancies in 2006, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health. The result of those averted pregnancies was 810,000 fewer abortions, the institute said.
Publicly financed contraception pays for itself, by reducing money spent through Medicaid on childbirth and child care. Guttmacher found that every $1 invested in family planning saved taxpayers $3.74.
As for international family planning, the Guttmacher Institute calculates that a 15 percent decline in spending there would mean 1.9 million more unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 more abortions and 5,000 more maternal deaths.
So when some lawmakers preen their anti-abortion feathers but take steps that would result in more abortions and more women dying in childbirth, that’s not governance, that’s hypocrisy.
What I disagreed mostly about Kristof's column is the idea that Paul Ryan's plan is bold and courageous.
Bold? Yeah, it shows that Ryan's balls are the size of grapefruits.
Courageous? throwing the elderly and the poor under the bus so you can give the rich more tax cuts doesn't make you courageous, it makes you an asshole.
We can hand-wring all we want about how Barack Obama is selling the middle class out in order to win favor with his rich donors. There might be some truth to that. But what really is the problem is that Congress is completely fucked up. We will never get anything done unless we keep on electing the same people, over, and over, again. Progress in America shouldn't be held hostage because it would make the Michele Bachmann's in the world mad. Thomas Jefferson got it right when he said that every generation was entitled to their own revolution. And the Conservative revolution has had its time and it needs to go away. But until then, we will continue to be governed by amateurs.
In closing, I would like to leave you with a few words from H.L. Mencken. Words that are shockingly relevant to what is happening to our Government:
"It is one of my firmest and most sacred beliefs, reached after due prayer, that the Government of the United States, in both its legislative and its executive arms, is corrupt, ignorant, incompetent and disgusting-and from this judgment I except no more than twenty lawmakers and no more than twenty executioners of their laws."