When Congress Is So Very Bad — and Sensible People Cannot Get anything Done — Well-Spoken Insults Bring Wry Smiles to Our Lips — and Give Us Excuses Not to Look in the Mirror

© 2012  Peter Free

 

16 July 2012

 

 

Congress’ cry-baby slackers

 

Said Ezra Klein of Congress:

 

This week, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

 

This was the 33rd time they voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

 

Holding that vote once makes sense. But 33 times?

 

If doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result makes you insane, what does doing the same thing 33 times and expecting a different result make you?

 

Well, it makes you the 112th Congress.

 

Hence Mark Twain’s old joke, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

 

But the 112th Congress is no ordinary congress. It’s a very bad, no good, terrible Congress. It is, in fact, one of the very worst congresses we have ever had.

 

©2012 Ezra Klein, 14 reasons why this is the worst Congress ever, Washington Post (13 July 2012) (paragraph split)

 

Klein goes on to provide 14 persuasive pieces of evidence supporting his proposition.

 

 

It feels good to point fingers — until we recognize that we are the people who put these pampered responsibility-dodgers into power

 

Our responsibility avoidance, as citizens, is so bad, that even the mainstream media are beginning to recognize the truth.

 

From This Week:

 

Unfortunately, lawmakers feel little public pressure to forge a plan now, rather than when time is nearly up.

 

They know voters are enraged by cuts in government services that benefit them, and at the same time oppose higher taxes to sustain those programs.

 

"In my years of polling, there has never been an issue such as the deficit on which there has been such a consensus among the public about its importance," said Pew Research Center President Andrew Kohut, "and such a lack of agreement about acceptable solutions."

 

Americans, in other words, are getting the government we deserve.

 

© 2012 In-Depth Briefing, Countdown to Taxmageddon, This Week 12(573-574): 11 (6-13 July 2012) (paragraph split)

 

In the midst of this crisis of responsibility avoidance, we delude ourselves with memories of past American greatness

 

Politicians habitually reassure us with the idea of “American exceptionalism” and with reflexive references to patriotism.

 

However, the most impressively noticeable thing about us these days is our unwillingess to pay for what we want and use.

 

We are adamantly not willing to tax ourselves for the services we demand.  Nor are most of us willing to bleed in the wars we start.

 

We keep foisting the idea of necessary sacrifice onto somebody else.

 

 

The moral? — “Those guys” are us

 

It is not just Congress and the Executive Branch that are behaving like cry-baby losers.

 

I go back to columnist David Brooks’ recent observation:

 

The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous).

 

© 2012 David Brooks, Why Our Elites Stink, New York Times (12 July 2012)

 

Individual selfishness is the focus of the first.  Service and sacrifice that of the second.

 

The combat military has known for centuries that a squad (and larger) cannot survive as a group of selfishly disconnected individuals.

 

If our voting public keeps going in the responsibility-avoiding direction that it overwhelmingly is, History is going to wipe us out.  And — no lack of appreciation for Mr. Klein’s insightful analysis intended — blaming Congress is not going to make us any less extinct.