In his column last month, my esteemed opponent On The Left said our country was no longer the shining city on the hill that President Ronald Reagan called it. Instead, my opponent said the United States was now a “rotting corpse”.
Despite my initial shock, I have actually come to possibly agree with him but for different reasons. These United States are no longer the bastion of freedom and liberty envisioned and protected by our founding fathers. Political correctness has frozen unbridled free speech. For many citizens, more than half of their earnings now go to federal, state, and local governments. And the lack of civility and respect for our fellow citizens has never been worse in my lifetime.
Despite all of the campaign talk by candidate Obama about him being The One to heal the partisan and racial divide in our country, he and his team of community activists in his regime are actually taking us back to the troubled 1950s and 1960s when every social and economic challenge had a racial or class tinge to it.
Nothing gets me angrier than hearing that those of us who are against his big government radical plans only do so because he is a black President. Or that since we have money in the bank, we are immoral for not wanting the federal government to redistribute more of it to those of lesser economic means. The lefties in the national media even tried to discredit the recent wildly successful concerned citizens’ march on Washington as being motivated by hatred for Obama’s skin color and because of greed.
And of course, Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina was actually reprimanded by Congress at the urging of the Black Caucus for blurting “You Lie” when Obama gave another of his partisan speeches on healthcare during an unnecessary Joint Session of Congress. I think the Black Caucus would serve the country better by forcing the reprimand of Charlie Rangel, the long-time black Congressman from Harlem, who still heads the tax writing House Ways and Means Committee despite being investigated for tax fraud and misuse of rent-controlled apartments in New York City.
But our country’s current decline is from more than the Obama plague and its divisive fever. The overall political situation in Washington and in many state capitals is no longer focused on helping citizens but instead on rewarding clients of the biggest campaign contributors and lobbyists. Sadly, a Congressman’s number one job requirement these days is being able to raise enough money for their next election. Of course we always hear there is no “quid pro quo” for those campaign donations. Tell that to the head of the Service Employees International Union who has bragged about his easy access to policy makers these days.
Both of the primary national political parties in this country have mostly morphed into full time job machines for their politicians, aides, and favored vendors. Whatever happened to the belief in citizen legislators who go about their personal business most of the year and go to Washington as needed to debate and legislate. Instead, we now have many members of Congress who have served a majority of their lives on the public dole rather than staying grounded in reality with other professions as most state legislators still do. And we are asked to applaud these Congressmen upon their retirement or death. We need term limits for the Congress just as we have for the Presidency and its executive staff.
Our capitalist market system is also suffering from too much self-interest. Like when GE had all of the media outlets it owns focus on “being green” which implicitly helped its energy and lighting divisions. Or when AIG took billions of dollars of government bailout money, paid many of those same billions to repay its debt to Goldman Sachs, which then repaid billions of its own bailout debt from Uncle Sam so that Goldman Sachs could clear its account and be free to pay enormous bonuses to its top 2,000 employees. From my basic understanding of math, Goldman Sachs simply paid back the government with government money from AIG while keeping its original bailout funds for its own self-interest.
Despite my current Carter-like malaise about America, I still believe most of its people are vigilant about maintaining it proper course and will come out in droves in 2010 to get rid of most of the trouble makers in Congress so that our country can again be that shining city on the hill.
