J’Accuse!
I was listening to a talk show host railing against Obama’s announcement that, henceforth, all government owned businesses (which will soon be all businesses), are going to have salary caps. For me, the problem with this move, aside from the fact that the Democratically-controlled Congress just awarded itself a huge pay raise, making this the ultimate in gross hypocrisy, is the government’s interference with the free market — but I guess that’s just the libertarian capitalist pig in me.
The radio talk show host had a different problem. He was incensed that that government is punitively targeting business men and women, while doing nothing to clean its own house. If the government can’t police itself, considering its manifest personal corruption (taxes, anyone?) and its major, indeed primary, contribution to the market collapse, it certainly is in no position to insist that ordinary business men and women suffer.
It occurred to me that the talk show host’s ire was misdirected. The fact is that few people or entities are good at policing themselves. The notion of policing contemplates an internal organization that theoretically doesn’t have a dog in the vote, and will be willing to point the finger of blame and purge or punish malfeasors. In a democracy, the role of “policeman to the government” shouldn’t be the government, it should be the voter.
While we voters may not police our pols by sending them to prison, we have the huge power of firing them. Except this time, the voters didn’t fire anybody, at least anybody in the Legislative branch. Thus, while one can excuse the Obama vote on the ground that the voters were voting against Bush (despite his imminent, automatic departure), rather than for Obama, there is no getting a way from the fact that voters, rather than punishing a Democratic Congress that had an approval rating deservedly skating near the single digits, rewarded it big time by giving it an overwhelming majority.
Even if the real malefactors weren’t up for election this year (the Rangels, Reids, etc.), the voters could have defanged them by failing to vote in any of their political compatriots — but voters didn’t. Instead, voters gave a huge, smacking kiss to the whole kit-and-kaboodle of corrupt, idiotic, and/or foolish Democrats.
I’m going to continue to poke at individual Democrats at my blog in order to reveal their hypocrisy, ignorance, stupidity, cupidity, etc. That information needs to be part of the public information database and arsenal. Nevertheless, as I do it, I still know that, looking at Dems en masse rather than individually, it is the nature of the Democratic beast to do precisely what it is doing: chip away at individual liberties, destroy the free market, erase our borders, and weaken our national security.
Democrats do what Democrats do. It is we, the members of the public, who are supposed to curtail those Democratic excesses, and we failed abysmally in that task. In the primaries, Republican voters chose the weakest candidate, one who never had more than a faint hope of victory. In the halls of Republican power, politicians and their minions failed to communicate the coherent, rational, moral message of true conservative thought. And in millions of homes across America, average voters, those who are not politically committed, failed by allowing themselves to swallow, hook, line & sinker, the propagandistic crap being fed to them by the mainstream media — and that despite the fact that the voters readily acknowledged the media’s unparalleled bias, and have had shown to them time and time and time again the media’s willingness to bend or ignore or misreport facts in order to feed that bias.
To the extent that the first two weeks of the Obama presidency presage a miserable time of it at home and abroad, I blame the American public, which could have thrown the bums out, but chose instead to hand them to keys to the kingdom. J’Accuse, oh Americans. Let’s hope you get it right the next time around, assuming there is a next time.
