Hope for Meaningful Leadership Was Disappointed in New Hampshire’s Republican Presidential “Debate”

© 2011 Peter Free

 

15 June 2011

 

 

Talking fact-divorced and meaningless aphorisms, when slasher-facts are bleeding us to death, is not the way to success or simple survival

 

If we need a sign of the desperate times we’re in, the New Hampshire Republican presidential debate (13 June 2011) provided it.

 

The “debate” (which was actually a serial oration in rhetorical witlessness) demonstrated that Republican leadership these days is comprised of generally good-looking political hacks, who have no semblance of a workable plan for strengthening, rather than weakening, the United States.

 

Given that Democratic leaders are comparably lacking, the Republican fiasco means that the entire slate of this nation’s political leadership is inviting us to national disaster.

 

 

Robert Sheer’s accurate description of the situation

 

The Republican debate left me thinking that politicians have a gift for appearing to be intelligent and tuned-in, without actually being so.  That is not a prescription for American progress in the Twenty-First Century.

 

“Liberal” Robert Scheer accurately (even from my centrist perspective) described the nation’s post-debate political mess:

 

[The Republican presidential candidates] assumed the stance of the Seven Dwarfs, not as a matter of physical but rather intellectual stature.

 

Not one of the candidates for the GOP presidential nomination who debated Monday night rose to a point of seriousness in addressing the nation's grievous problems.

 

The Republican debate dashed any expectation that some populist candidate would rise from that side of the aisle, and in an honest way tap into voter resentment over the deep hurt that the Wall Street superrich have put on ordinary Americans.

 

Instead, the candidates made regulation the enemy, rather than the misdeeds that responsible legislation is intended to curtail.

 

As the Wall Street Journal summarized the New Hampshire debate:

 

Republican presidential hopefuls on Monday pressed for the dismantling of government regulations drawn up over 40 years, using a candidates' debate here to call for the scaling back or elimination of environmental, labor, financial and health-care rules.

 

© 2011 Robert Scheer, Seven Republican Dwarfs, Huffington Post (15 June 2011)

 

 

How many times does even a dim-witted person need to be dropped on his or her head to learn Reality’s lessons?

 

Republicans and Democrats seem to think that absurdly generalized ideologies can cope with rhetoric-killing facts.

 

In the Republican case, unquestioning ideological allegiance to complete de-regulation and to absolutely unconstrained markets has been repeatedly proven to be socially and economically destructive.  The demonstration goes back at least to the early 1800s.

 

Yet, two centuries later, these apparently mind-impenetrable political opportunists are still talking against History’s repeated demonstrations.

 

 

A Dance of Twits is sending these proud United States to History’s bone-yard

 

Reality-disregarding Republicans will put not any pressure at all on President Obama to do what actually needs to be done in order to enhance American prospects for economic progress.

 

This political lapse is almost inexplicable because the President has reportedly proven himself to fall short of the leadership standard required for our troubled times.

 

It should not have been too much to ask that a Republican presidential candidate note the President’s deficiencies in a reasonable and nuanced way.  And come up with an achievable plan to better his unimpressive record.

 

Instead, the New Hampshire debate treated us to one Republican after another air-headedly attacking the President on grounds so divorced from his actual transgressions, as to be irrelevant to the American situation.

 

 

Is the problem us?

 

Why do we give these searingly inadequate political people keys to American leadership?