Standing Watch

Every now and then, a politician just has to vent, and state the obvious.

Thursday evening, at a political fundraising dinner held by the held by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), President Barack Obama compared the GOP to a bad driver, telling his audience of the GOP, “After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want to keys back. No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”

It seems a pretty accurate description of what happened to the US economy, after years of neoliberal economic (commonly referred to as neoconservative in the US, because those neoliberals hate the name liberal) policies designed to siphon every penny away from the lower 99.9% of the economic ladder to the top 0.1% of it. The problem is, if what I’m seeing across the nation is any indication, not only is the car still in the ditch, we’re still waiting for a tow truck to yank it out.

A more accurate description would be a story I caught today, where a valet handed the keys to a Ferrari F430 Spider (valued at about $500k) to the wrong driver, who then took it out for a lengthy joyride before the cops finally caught him. I couldn’t help but think that’s exactly what the US Supreme Court did in late 2000, when they went way outside their constitutional authority and in essence declared George W. Bush the next President of the United States.

Unlike the Ferrari, which was recovered undamaged, what we got back was a total wreck. The Bush Administration quite literally took the United States, and the world, on a lengthy joyride, before smashing our unity against a tree, and bouncing our economy into the local sewage treatment pond.

But, by far the most accurate comparison of what the GOP really did is to compare them to a repeat drunk driver who destroys a whole family. We keep catching the driver, keep punishing the driver, and then we let the driver back onto the roadways Along the way, the damage that driver does gets worse each time they get behind the wheel, until, ultimately, tragedy strikes and someone takes the drunk driver’s behavior seriously.

This applies, more than most might think. We’ve become a nation divided along race, religion, politics, and class. People have died because leaders didn’t care enough to address known threats, and then many times that died because we believed their promises that they will change and do a better job. And then they just do it again, only now we face national death.

The Republican Party, in word, action, and deed, has made clear they want to get back behind the wheel, after killing our economy, dividing our nation, polluting the water and air we need to live, and plunging us into a generational war across the planet. They’ve made clear they intend to return to their power-drunk behaviors. They continue to grab at the keys of power by any means, a few of which border on outright treason. And now, they promise to undo all the efforts to fix what they’ve worked hard to destroy.

The problem is, it would appear the Obama Administration owns the bar, the Democratic Party is serving the drinks to the GOP, and now we have the Tea Party Movement handing the keys over to the GOP.

If they get back behind the wheel, the results will be tragic.

President Obama made a somewhat funny joke about a potential situation that is anything but.

We’ve already seen examples of what is to come, especially when it came to the alleged health care reform debates (more like staged productions). From back room deals with insurance and Big Pharma in the White House, to secret political deals within the House and Senate just to get something, anything, passed, what we got was far short of what was needed, and it won’t kick in until the GOP has multiple opportunities to repeal it.

Of course, that’s not all. One look at what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico, and then in Congress, shows just where the loyalties of certain elected officials lay. The glaring example comes from Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who stood up and blocked a proposed bill in the US Senate to raise liability limits from $75 million to $10 billion (about half the amount proposed in the US House). Murkowski, who has received nearly $300,000 from the oil and gas lobby in the last few years, claimed she opposed the bill (S 3305), because it would hurt “mom and pop operations.”

Congress is, quite frankly, corrupt to its core, beholden to transnational corporations who fund their multi million dollar re-election campaigns, rather than the people they are supposed to be representing, the actual voters. It’s why they refuse to honestly consider real campaign finance reform, and spend more time raising campaign funds than they do on the jobs they were elected to do.

And, so far as this writer is concerned, Obama is woefully unprepared and far too inexperienced to be effective enough to deal not just with the problems our nation is facing, but to take on the corruption that appears to now be effecting him as well. These are a couple of the reasons I did not vote for him, and to date he has proven me correct every step of the way.

I was hoping that he, and his party, would prove me wrong.

But do we really want to give power back to those who got us into this mess to begin with? Do we really want to keep in power those who are ready to put them back behind the wheel? Are we, as a nation, willing to believe the lies we are being spoon-fed, to buy into the fears being rammed down our throats, and to honestly say “give the keys back to the drunk driver?”

What if it’s your family the drunk driver hits next?

A character from Tom Clancy’s “Hunt for Red October” called it right. A politician is a cheat and a liar, and if they aren’t kissing babies, they’re stealing their lollipops. Pay attention, look at who’s funding the campaigns, the voting records, and fact check what those seeking your vote are telling you. Learn to question those willing to spend millions of campaign dollars for a job that pays perhaps 1%-2% of what they spent. Odds are, they are up to no good.