Who Will Stop It?

The other day a friend of mine was getting really down about politics.  I understood.

Neither side seems serious about reducing the debt, the deficit or even curbing the slightest of abuses of Congress. Jobs are still MIA, the housing crisis has all of the nation trapped in mortgage amber and the super increase in demand for government safety nets and use of them coupled with the increase in taxes across the board on all those who are not yet using them continues to make day to day living much more of a chore than it ought to be.  We used to breathe easier.

Then, there are the unspoken problems like the systemic ethical, moral and constitutional flaws in the currently existing health care law, the erosion of liberties a ‘la Patriot Act Part Deux, the Drone Wars, the massive increase in authority and oversight of the IRS, and the lack of safety of American people abroad if the government decides to look the other way or spread a convenient untruth when some diplomat has the poor taste to be assassinated during an election year. Fast and Furious has been neatly swept under a rug never to be mentioned again.  I also forgot to mention the Kill List.  Before anyone says “Hey! You’re piling on Obama!” let me point out, Romney isn’t mentioning these things either so either he wants to keep them going or he’s gutless on this point and so they’ll still exist.  Either way, I’m irritated.  It means these things that shouldn’t be in a nation that values rule of law, the Constitution and due process, will be allowed to continue. (SSSHHHHHHHH, Not supposed to think that or criticize, just vote and be done with it).

That the polls that aren’t rah rahing for one side indicate a mostly 50-50 call indicates the reason for the near passionless political life of those on either side who normally put up signs, get out the vote and debate their neighbors.

But I told my friend, “As Catholics, we have to stay informed. As Catholics, we are compelled to be involved.  As Catholics, we have to act.” In other words, we can’t just rail (wrath undirected is the equivalent of being a troll in com boxes, it’s stupid, unbecoming and doesn’t persuade hearts, change minds or affect policy –it only leaves everyone else with a sour taste in their mouth when your name pops up).  We can’t despair.  (That’s quitting with a whimper. It also means whoever wins doesn’t need to pay you any mind).  And Further, we can’t give up. The fight to stop these abuses or have them investigated, repealed or addressed is not ended by a vote or an election.  The decision in November is merely an indicator of how steep the climb to win will be (excruciating or merely grueling).  The energy of before the election is nothing compared to what will be needed after, regardless.  I would argue that these three things hold true for all Americans. We can’t rage. We can’t despair, and we can’t give up.

Holding our officials accountable has become something not done unless the political class sees a profit in it.  Over the past few years a pattern has emerged:

If it:      hurts others on your side in the election, you get sacked.

If it:      doesn’t seem to matter because it’s not an election year for your side, yawn and move on, nothing to see here.

If it:      hurts your opponents even if it’s nothing, there will be one indignant person who gets on camera to give a speech amounting to “Never in my whole life have I been more scandalized and this person should not simply be forced to resign but stand outside on the mall in the rain wearing a sign “I STINK and DESERVE TO BE SPIT UPON BY GOD AND MAN) before being tarred, feathered, audited and thrown in jail indefinitely.”

Then the offending person shall be quietly dismissed with their golden parachute and become part of the speaking head circuit.

If I sound jaded, cynical and agitated, it’s all true. Mostly because I fail at those three things, not wanting to being wrathful, not wanting to despair and not wanting to quit and say “I’ll take my toys and go home.”

We have to fix the home we have.  We have to call every senator and every representative and demand they pass a budget, demand they pass budgets every day, don’t let the Congress go home for recess until they fulfill their congressional constitutionally defined duties.  Zero out every salary of every elected official and every pension of every elected official until they do their actual job.  Pay all of what is lost to the debt. They can live as those who are jobless if they aren’t going to do their job. Every agency that doesn’t file its taxes, every employee that does not file taxes, fired.  Fired. Fired. Fired.  Every one of them.  Every single one.

We ought to call the press and tell them that they need to cover the red and the blue with equal zeal and curiosity rather than pure disdain and absolute adulation based on political affiliation.  You want to know why your circulation is dying? Because you only sing to yourselves and congratulate yourselves on how beautiful you sound.  Edit and vet yourselves.  Be brave enough to speak the truth and document it with facts from reliable sources. Vet your sources better than high school students are currently demanded to do. I know there are exceptions, but they are not the rule.

We ought to cry out at our President and those who aspire to the office, “GROW UP! Do the job! Stop offering what you don’t have and demonizing those who disagree. You’ve burned your last straw man. We are real. Our problems are real and we have real disagreements about how to solve them and we’re not stupid. Stop hyperventilating at each other and demanding we do the same.”  If you want the job, you better have a plan and it better be more than it will just take time or wait and see.  Despite our constant distractedness, we can follow along.  We are a nation of common sense and honor, we deserve better.  Our leaders ought to be able to get along with others better than we expect our children to in school.  They also ought to be held accountable for failures that aren’t merely gaps in communication or the inability to tell a story or build the narrative.  We all know the difference between failing to present a compelling case for a good plan and failing to present a good case period.  I would argue, President Obama has proven he doesn’t have a case to prove, and Romney needs to actually present one as a counter.

Failing that, failing us by failing in their duties in favor of a party or in favor of donors or in favor of amassing power, we as the citizens of this country should tell all of you who hold positions we pay for, positions we’ve entrusted you with, positions designated to be honors for leadership, we fire you today. We shall not be part of this experiment anymore.  It is failing because you have failed.  You have failed us. You have been wretched poor stewards of our past, our present and our posterity. You have failed the future of this country by your votes in the present.  Your grades are not incomplete anymore. They are “F’s.”

I still am hopeful that our nation can right itself, that we can grow the economy, bring down the debt and the deficit, improve our existing services and rid a lot of the waste and repeal those laws that threaten the fabric of our nation’s core values.   I am hopeful because our country is bigger than either party or any president.  But it will become harder as laws and practices that erode our liberties codify and become accepted as simply part of life.  (See abortion if you need a perfect example).

At some point, if we do not stop, if we do not demand that our government limit itself, the government shall be all and we shall cease to be a free people.  We cannot be free if our every action is now monitored and sanctioned or disapproved. We cannot be free if we must always be “careful” about our thoughts and words.  We shall become serfs of the elected. If the government can dictate the limits of our faith, what stops the government from deciding our limits need to be still greater?  At what point does the government become a secular caliphate?  We the huddled masses yearning to be free will know that our security depends on surrendering not only that freedom, but that yearning.  This is not an R or a D problem. It isn’t a case of who started it. It’s a case of WHO WILL STOP IT?  Because if no one does, we as a nation will cease to be the great promise to the world we once were and our children will grow up not understanding what they’ve lost.

Top Ten Reasons

10) attending intelligence briefings.

9) hitch in his swing that needs work…extra tee times won’t wait.

8) have to deal with damage control of Joe Biden

7) Beyonce’  Netanyahu…Beyonce’ Netanyahu…Beyonce

6) Being a brilliant consummer of information, he doesn’t need to meet with Israel’s Prime Minister, he knows enough that it isn’t necessary.

5) Having put it to a 2/3rds majority rule vote, the ruling was not to do it.

4) These strawmen won’t beat themselves.

3) sending a folding chair.

2) He could win Dinner with me if he’d just donate 3 dollars.

1) I said, “Call me maybe.”

The Dog Ate My Girlfriend So I Made One Up

Anyone who suffered through our POTUS’ autobiography (now located in the fiction department of your local bookstore) and read about his New York girlfriend now knows that this was more of a composite creation, a merger of multiple women to create the woman in the pages. Now he did acknowledge that some people were composites and the reason he cites is their personal privacy.  Indeed.  .So private, they can’t be identified. He should give lessons to other agencies that thrive on secrecy. This is how you do it.

Given that she is a composite, one must ask, what is the author trying to say by using this tool? Via Politico:

“In Dreams from My Father, Obama chose to emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he described as his New York girlfriend,” Maraniss writes, offering a passage from the book in which they go to see a play by a black playwright:

One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.

 

There is the authenticity of the nature of the arguement with this person.  He asserts. She disagrees. He asserts more.  End of arguement.  Seems like the “I won” approach to things. But she’s also a device to allow him to posit that the anger and the remembering of that anger and note the curious lack of detail. We don’t know the playwrite or the play or the theatre so we can’t know how mainstream or radical this humor that he posits is typical, is.   We’re left as always, to fill in the blanks and have to trust the narrator’s opinion and reporting of the things as they were.   If this is composite, how are we to know that anything in this landscape is anything but sand, shadows of multiple experiences swirled together to create a POV that advances an agenda?  We can’t.

One could ask, how many other fictional but based on real people and events moments are in his tedious self genuflecting tome but that would be fruitless since the press and those in a position to discover the man behind the curtain have shown themselves to suffer from an appauling lack of curiosity.  It’s not likely to change much as we might hope.

So I suggest a new title for the book: Never let the truth ruin a good story.

The big question is why is the President admitting to this now? Is it because Jim Treacher and Weazel Zippers and even some at Politico amongst others, have actually read his book and now can begin the rebuttal of the 2008 campaign and its aftermath? (They’re looking for those pesky things called facts). Is this a preemptive attempt to dissarm any future “I ate dog” type scandals between now and the election that would tarnish the glowy Obama is like better than Superman-Jesus-Champaign-and-Caviar-Einstein+awesome awesomeness type image? I suspect not.

This is about elections.  How to top the purple prose of the prior cammpaign and reenergize the Obama fainting zombies of the past?

Write and launch a new book…or have someone else do it, with things that weren’t in the first two…how to get people to read it?  Admit that some of what was written wasn’t 100% factually are of accurate…not truthfully speaking accurate….and allow the lure of mystery, of getting the intimate details of the real person do the rest.   They’ll buy it. And whatever you put in to explain why you didn’t tell the truth in the last two books, they’ll buy that too…because they want this Cool-ade President, who looks great on a cover of Teen Beat…I’m sorry, Newsweek.

Expect more attempts to create an aw shucks type humility it wasn’t all true but hey it’s all in good fun and aren’t I cool and wonderful narrative by the media through November.  He will recraft himself and recast himself more times than Lady Gaga and Madonna combined (icky thought) and if he can’t, expect the lapdogs in the press to create in Romney or any other Republican or anyone who would vote Republican as the visual and mental image of evil incarnate worse than Satan times infinity with a dash of pure ignorance to add to the spite.  Not only are they evil, they’re stupid and evil. You can’t let them win…

Not far from reality for possible Liberal bumper stickers:

Republicans….Romney….now with 20% more evil for 2012.

or Romney…Elected…the reason the Mayans were right.

Know that we will get hammered over and over again with a double dog dare to prove we’re not racist and that it wasn’t just trying to hang out with the cool kid and make history but that we really BELIEVED…and if we really BELIEVE….then we have to give him a second term.  Clap your hands three times and say I do believe taxes promote and create jobs and growth. I do I do I do.

So be prepared.

It is inconceivable to these folks that there are people out there in this land who oppose them on principle and not out of hatred of “the other.” as has been floated in recent newscasts.  It’s coming. We shall become a composite of all the left hates, rather than our own selves in the narrative.

Why?

It’s much easier to hate and love composites than real people who are often more than their political affiliation or orientation or racial or economic background.  It’s much easier to target and destroy straw men and demagouge your opponents than to wrestle with real flesh and bone arguements and counter proposals.  And if we’ve learned anything from our real flesh and bones President and his daydreamy virtual version of himself in print, it’s that whatever else this man is, there is a laziness about his intellect.  He expects people to follow though he lead. He expects to win by simply asserting his opinion.

Expect it.

 

New Year’s Resolutions for Everyone Else

Because making resolutions for other people is so much easier and more satisfying than doing it for one’s self, this year I’m proposing the following for our existing Congress, Executive Branch and General Public.  It’s the very least I can do.
10) Bo will switch from gourmet IAMS Premium to Generic dog food as a symbolic gesture of solidarity with those in the 99%, animals who do not occupy the White House.

9) Because the economy is still down and spending public money carelessly or extravagantly would be unseemly and project an image that our President and First Lady are out of touch, State Dinners now to be the small buffet (one trip only) at Sizzlers…before five.

8) All Campaign Fund Raisers will be 50/50, with half going towards the treasury. After all, none of the politicians want to be unduly influenced by dirty money from lobbyists, fat cats, corporations or rich famous people who want access.

7) Any person who says, “Raise My Taxes” will immediately be hit up for a donation of 10% of their bank account, not income, current existing money. Any person who says, “Raise Their Taxes” will be immediately hit up with a 5% increase tax on all expenditures to remind them that nothing happens in a vacuum.

6) A fee on all politicians, 5$ for each untruth/slander/distortion uttered. Pro: if they continue as normal, the debt will be erased within the political year. Bonus Pro: if they wise up, we won’t have to hear their bloviating.

5) Hypocrisy Oath: A new demand of all elected officials…to act as they preach, or be forced to wear a scarlet “H” and hold a sign, “I”m annoying and sanctimonious and you pay me.”

4) Hollywood Documentation: They can tell us how important their thoughts are only after they release all their transcripts, SAT scores and can beat Sarah Palin in a debate to be shown on Pay Per View.  Losers take a vow of a year of silence.

3) All recipients of stimulus money must document jobs created and/or saved. Doormen for the revolving access to the Whitehouse for political donations do not count.

2) Press will cease pretending they are anything but cheerleaders and carry pom poms to all future political events and do jack knives when the politicians speak so that no one is unclear who they’re rooting for.

1) If you ask for 1.3 Trillion more, you have to show all your work to get credit for the math.  No more imaginary numbers, only absolute and real ones.

Get Ready For Fall Clean Up

It’s never too early. We are still on vacation, just back from a few days driving to Montreal and a great visit there. The next three days will be chores and errands in the mornings and fun outings in the afternoons before school and work start up again.

Today we could avoid the garden no longer. Choked with noxious weeds. Shaggy. A mess. Poison ivy. Wild roses pricking the unwary. Thistles ditto. Bamboo sending in invading roots from the neighbor’s yard–runners up to thirty feet under my lawn from the fence. And, yes, I use those teachable moments to make heavy-handed political metaphors for the benefit of my groaning offspring…

So, after some heavy duty maternal preaching, seasoned with appeals to family spirit, guilt, veiled threats, and sweetened with the promise of filthy lucre if enough work was accomplished (it’s the American way) the kids and I proceeded outside. Crews of Mexicans at work on our neighbors’ microscopic and manicured yards. This had the effect of arousing a certain competitive spirit in my teen boy.

In an hour we had filled up the back of the Explorer with four huge barrels squished full of wild roses, vines, a dead yew bush, and weeds clipped and uprooted. Mulch had been spread. The front yard looked a lot better. You could see that there was a blueberry bush and blackberry canes in the side yard again (as opposed to eight foot high monsters of vines earlier.

I heard a yelp from my son on the side. He had pulled vigorously at some tall weeds and disturbed a ground nest of yellow jackets. He was too fast for them. I said gently:

“You know, honey bunny, (he is 17 but tolerates such maternal foolishness if NOBODY is around to hear it) it’s like politics. Nasty critters get settled in and don’t like it when you disturb them. They’ll sting you no matter what. You can’t reason with them. So just go do something else, and I’ll deal with them. ”

We finished up fetching and carrying the piles of weeds from the rest of the project, amazed at how the weeds had just sprung up and choked the flowers and vegetables. A little neglect on our part, and things we had planted with high hopes were either dead or stunted.

Again, I nudged him: “This happens in politics and the economy, too…We were sloppy this summer because it was hot, and we were busy with other things, so we didn’t take care of the garden. Well, people are often the same way about their political liberties and keeping track of what those scummy politicians want to do with our money. You can’t be. If we had weeded the garden every time we walked thru it (the way we do most years) it would be fine now. The same with politics. The worst thing in the world for corrupt and authoritarian political leaders is a citizenry that is alert and intelligent and keeping an eye on them.”

“Sheesh, Mom…”

Oh well, subtlety never was my strong point….heheh But I hope all of you are ready to do a LOT of weeding in late fall. Be ruthless! We have a beautiful garden and a lot of pests to root out of it.

Somehow, Pelosi the Airbrushed Glossy seems an Apt Metaphor to me

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/blogs/yeas-and-nays/Vogue_-Cover-girl-Pelosi-looking-rather-airbrushed-in-D_C_-glossy-92327844.html

Nancy Pelosi got an extreme makeover Al Gore style, (if you remember that “embellished” cover shot of the Veep and I’m not talking about the planet Earth in his doomsday scenarios), for the cover of Capital File. She looks as good as the numbers on the deficit neutral healthcare bill and just about as real.   It makes sense: Imaginary numbers, equally imaginary images of the Speaker of the House:  because the real thing ain’t pretty.