Saturday, April 13, 2013

Simple Truths

Simple Truths




 
The common saying we hear is that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Well -- Government is broke and needs fixing.

The Republican Party for the most part is simply happy to proclaim that far and wide. They simply forget to say how they’ll fix it or make any substantial effort to fix what broke it.

In 2007 at a Republican Congressional District Roundup to Rally the troops for our Congressman at the time in which he asked the assembled faithful why people were not behind the Republicans as evidenced by the sweeping Democrat victories in the 2006 off year elections. He seemed genuinely perplexed. I rose and said something to this effect.

“If you had a car whose transmission was broke and took it to a garage and they gave it back to you after claiming to fix it and -- it didn’t work, it cost twice what it should have as if it was fixed and they continued to claim it did work and that their charge was reasonable, and then because you were unwilling to pay you were somehow unfaithful to the cause; would you seriously take your car back to that same garage to get it running?”

I told him that I wouldn’t nor would any sane person. I then said the Republicans were given all the reigns of power and didn’t do what they claimed they would. What did they expect the voters to do.

Well history tells us the Republicans didn’t change much and a Democrat promising change won the Presidency to match the House with a filibuster proof Senate in the 2008 elections. The only redeeming occurrence for Republicans that history tells us is that the Democrats also charged twice as much to fix it, claimed it was fixed and like Republicans left it worse off than they found it.

So again the voters picked the only option there was in the two party system in the 2010 off year election and gave the House back to the Republicans and took away the filibuster Senate from the Democrats.

This article is supposed to be about “simple truths” so the simple truth I’ve seen in all of this is that the voters when faced with incompetence voted for anyone promising change. The other “simple truth” is that once elected the party promising change didn’t come through. The car remained broke.

The other truth was that the Tea Party provided the face of change for the Republican Party in the 2010 election. The truth was that the Republican Party didn’t change their message until pushed by the Tea Party. Whether the change offered by the New Republicans will be substantive remains to be seen. Whether the Tea Party offers “concrete” change as Peggy Noonan in the article by her refers to below remains also to be seen.

I think Demagoguery, is just an excuse for lazy minds, provides something to say for those incapable of thinking for themselves on the right and left.

The other “simple truth” that is above all the others; voters want their government to work. For all the money and power we as voters convey upon our legislators and the $trillions we pay in taxes, we expect solutions to our problems. What we get is unbridled bureaucracy which instead of fixing the problems convinces us that what they need is an ever-increasing budget to help them fix an ever-expanding group of newly defined problems.

It has been often quoted that the “War on Poverty” has been lost. We still however, continue to spend an ever-increasing amount fighting it.

Peggy Noonan in her Blog article, “Two Thoughts and a Question Answered” states another “simple truth” -- “nobody trusts Congress”. Rather than trying to paraphrase her thoughts, here is the full quote.

-----link-----
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2013/03/27/two-thoughts-and-a-question-answered/
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“Nobody trusts Congress. We all know this. Approval of Congress is at 13% in the polls. Part of this is the general decline in respect that Americans feel for their institutions. But part of it also is that Congress the past few years has taken to passing 1,000- or 2,000-page bills that nobody has read, and nobody knows what’s in them, and, as Nancy Pelosi famously said, we have to pass it to find out what’s in it. Administrators and bureaucrats get to define the meaning of page 873, paragraph 8, subsection 5, line 12. Their definitions often agitate the public. Everyone winds up feeling jerked around.”

The classic Noonan expression that “Everyone winds up feeling jerked around” is really the driving force today between the voters and all politicians and the government they are supposed to be running. That feeling is what formed the Tea Party, and has defined the word “Change” in a political setting. It has become apparent that it is now the bureaucrats and administrators running Congress not the other way around. The purpose of elected officials should be to guard the public’s interests from the bureaucracy’s and not to give free license to the bureaucracy fulfilling their interests over the public’s.

The other simple truth is that if our elected officials cannot do that, then they are redundant and we could have a less costly more simple bureaucratic despotism. For make no mistake it is a Bureaucratic Despotism that we are saddled with. Too pay all we do for the Congress just to give us the appearance of freedom without the substance is a waste of our money.

AND

The Car Remains Broken

.

Regards, Live Dangerously Be A Conservative