Aggregator • MaxedOutMama • ID=60924 |
Words VS Deeds - MaxedOutMama Jan 19, 2010, 2:01 pm
Since I am forging along in the extremes of exhaustion, you've been getting no words from me. I have been working hard. The Chief is doing pretty well.
The Democrats, on the other hand, have been specializing in tokenism and words, but neglecting the deeds. I suspect that's part of the reason why they have been losing Independents in such numbers.
Bob Herbert can't figure Dems out:
Jobs and freedom. In America, you can't have one without the other. Democrats are in deep trouble right now — just a year after their giddy celebration of Barack Obama's ascendance to the presidency — because so many millions of Americans are out of work, unable to find the gainful employment that would unlock the door to a stable future for themselves and their families.I can't figure it out either! Unless it is because almost all of their current policy agenda amounts, in practice, to a job-killing agenda, and they are loathe to recognize that. Herbert wants the government to launch job creation programs, but the government is awful at creating jobs. Businesses have to do it. In order for businesses to grow we should cut business taxes to a lower rate to be more competitive with international tax norms. That is the complete opposite of the Democratic agenda.
The president and his party may be obsessed with health care, but unemployed and underemployed Americans want a job. Why this has been so hard for the Democrats to realize, I can't say.
As Betsy points out, Obama hasn't really done much:
He hasn't been up to the task, and why should we expect that he would be? He has never run anything. He had not been in politics that long and only as a back-bencher. He can blame Bush all he wants, but he should have known what the job was going in. And campaigning through four years while blaming his predecessor and the Republicans for all his setbacks and handing over governing to Pelosi and Reid is not going to allow him to maintain the fantasy that was his campaign.I have spent most of my functional time since last Thursday dealing with SuperDoc's computer problems. To my amazement, his Symantec Endpoint managed to convert itself into a virus. Sadly, due to the Symantec products' design, which is intended to prevent trojans and viruses from knocking the product out of commission, when these installations go bad they convert themselves a Super Virus. I deleted over 75,000 files generated by SuperDoc's virus protection, which was blowing up his computer and shutting it down.
The Democrats might want to think about this. I used to really like Symantec's products, but in the push for total control, they overshot and now prevent the fixes to problems when they fail. So they're a heavy load drawing a disproportionate amount of resources when they work, and when they go bad they go very, very bad and cost a lot of skilled time to fix.
I know nothing about Massachusetts politics. It was only Saturday evening that I figured out who Martha Coakley and Scott Brown were. I also suspect that many people writing about this election don't know anything about Massachusetts politics either. But one thing is probably significant, and that is the huge margin for Brown among MA Independents shown in the polls.
And as for Obama, he should know that the health care bills in Congress are not going to help economically, and have major flaws. The push to pass something CALLED health care reform has won over the idea of reforming health care. So his support for this is really proof that he believes in tokens and not action.
SW still has hopes for Obama. I hope SW is right. But I find I gave up on Obama this weekend, when it became clear that once again his Haitian policy was more words than deeds. It was inevitable that the more the US did in Haiti the more controversial it would become, and there are real sovereignty issues. But Obama - the Nobel Peace Prize laureate - could have gotten on the phone with various heads of state and the head of the UN and brokered an agreement rather than waiting around for the UN group on the ground in Haiti to get itself together and tell us what they needed. For one thing, the local UN group's two top leaders were killed, so they had a significant leadership deficit.
Instead Obama has outsourced this again, and tens of thousands of Haitians have paid the price with lives and limbs. And who but Obama could do it? This is one area in which a major government action could have worked and would have saved many lives, and we really did not do what we should have done. A week is far too long. I believe that if Obama wouldn' t throw his weight around in such a noble cause, he has no intention of ever emerging from his professorial, rhetorical womb to become an effective president.
So the way I sum things up to myself is this:
A) The Republicans had control of Congress and they blew it.
B) The Democrats had control of Congress and they are managing to make it even worse.
C) Either we need to split control of Congress or we need a third party. We are going to have to get some competition and debate back into the system. A good president can't do much with a bad Congress, and the 98-0 vote in the Senate for the unemployment/major tax giveaway bill (to some of the worst offenders causing the current crisis) was seems to be proof positive that neither the GOP nor the Democrats care at all about good government or rational policies.
D) We might as well face it, we have a bad president from whom we can expect no help in the fight to get Congress to be a viable instrument of functional government instead of a graft-taking organization. For three more years.
I'm suspecting that the national growth of the Independent bloc in polling is a reflection that many share my A and B conclusions.
The irony is that I believe we truly must reform health care. I believe that we have to reregulate the financial system. I believe that the US has to turn its focus to rebuilding our internal, domestic economy on the basis of production and not consumption. The rhetoric is there. The action is not. The Obama administration's current policies are very Japanese, and Japan is on the brink. If we follow them we will be teetering on that edge in just a few years more. Congress doesn't appear to have any policies except to create huge streams of payoff money flowing from companies who want government benefits.
The sole consolation in the last week is that MLK would be pleased that we have a black president and that he will be judged by the content of his character.
We have made progress, but to make more we must turn to deeds. The era of rhetorical flourish is decisively over. Either we go back or we go forward, but our current government is one of our problems rather than being a part of the solution.
Update: See this. Our current dissension is really not between progressives, liberals, moderates and conservatives. It's between those who are interested in real world results and those who are interested in evading the truth about real world results. The divide is present among all political divisions, but not very active among the population, which, after all, mostly is subject to the results. Thus we have an increasing disconnect between our political class and our people and between our goals and our outcomes.
