Let’s play a game of word association.
Sequestration.
Diversion. Mirage. Trickery. Congressional. Presidential. Needed. Unnecessary.
All are true, depending on your point of view.
But better yet, perhaps we start with this: do you even know what sequestration is? Chances are, you’ve heard of it, incessantly so, the past several days. You can get a quick synopsis of sequestration here.
Basically, a deal was made 18 months ago to withhold federal funding programs of domestic and military nature. They put a clock on it, drew a finish line well past election day and then decided to deal with it later. They thought it would draw action.
Yet once again, our elected officials are in office to bicker with each other back and forth in the media. It’s Armageddon in nation’s capital again. And all we see is finger pointing. The White House blames the Congressional Republicans, the GOP blames the White House. Meanwhile, the people who put them all there sit and watch as our so-called leaders squabble like six-year-olds on a playground.
Actually, that’s probably not fair to six-year-olds.
We deserve more. We deserve better. We deserve, well, anything.
This is not a call to arms for the conservatives or an endorsement of the left. This is simply a plea from the American people. You have to know it’s bad when a famed journalist calls out the President in The Washington Post.
That’s what happened Sunday, when Bob Woodward – yes, that Woodward – did the journalistic duty of reporting fact. He pulled back the curtain and showed how this particular issue of sequestration was the brainchild of the White House. Yet he also did the journalistic duty of showing how Congressional Republicans had played a large role in this issue as well.
In a different time, this would be a good thing. But it’s not a different time. It’s America, present day, and we’re a bunch of self-righteous jerks. The left is shaming Woodward for basically outing President Obama following the POTUS outlandish claims that the Republicans were taking a meat clever to America. The same Bob Woodward who broke Watergate wide open and helped bring down President Nixon. He ought to have a lifelong pass from Democrats.
Apparently not.
Meanwhile, conservatives didn’t just point to Woodward’s column and use it as simple leverage to gain a political advantage behind closed door negotiations. No, no…that would be too old school, too classically political. The right used Woodward as ammo for the war – overused it in fact – and then mocked Woodward even in praising him for telling the truth.
Who could survive in a town like this? Better yet, who would want to?
Many of us were inspired in our own way growing up by our presidents and national leaders. Their speeches weren’t just rhetoric, they were a tactical plan wrapped in poetic text. Now, they are just speeches.
We’re not that dumb. We’re disinterested. We’re tired of the bickering and frankly, it’s confusing us.
A recent poll suggests….I don’t know what it suggests because it’s all over the map. 56 percent of the country thinks Republicans are out of touch, 46 percent think the Democrats are, 52 percent think Republicans are extreme, 39 percent think Democrats are. So one party is more or less crazy than another? Based on phone calls to 1,500 people over a three day span?
Politicians love polls. It allows them to continue to blame others, spin the data and distort facts, except when it’s obvious they are also viewed poorly or just plain wrong – then they paint themselves as Washington outsiders and just blame Washington.
It’s diversion. Trickery. Fiscal cliffs and sequestrations.
What are they doing? What are we doing? You know why the military industrial complex is upset over sequestration? Because it takes massive piles of increasingly worthless American money to build its equipment.
Democrats care about federal program cuts because the majority of the people who elect them receive money from those cuts. And it’s base is a wide conglomeration of groups with varying interests.
Republicans care about tax rates because they are elected by small business owners and others who’ve made incomes they don’t want to see even more taken out of. So when the White House demands programs to satisfy their base, the Republicans push back because they are defending their base.
And so no one does anything truly for the good of the people, but merely to hold on to what they have or gain more. In the end, it’s always about the money.
Folks, it’s just paper.
It only has value because somewhere, sometime ago, it was determined it held value. We could all agree to use buttons and M&Ms as our currency, it just has to be backed by something. I suppose this is human nature, but at some point, we’re going to break the ties that bind us.
As I have stated before, this must be how Rome fell – from within. From greed. From power derided by consent but without consent.
Befallen by diversion. By trickery. Needed, but unnecessary.
Destruction is happening to our formerly strong foundation. It won’t happen in a day, yet it is ever-occurring due to our insatiable thirst for conquest. We’ve defeated our enemies, so let us defeat each other.
Our great sequester began long ago and only the American people as a united whole, willing to agree to disagree – clearly – can be the ones to set us right again.
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