Thursday, October 18, 2012

Please, tell me one more time, “who am I voting for?”

   It never ceases to amaze me that the Republican Party keeps dishing up complete dunderheads for the main feast. There has been only one Republican, in my lifetime, who had the National Interest as his number one priority. Dwight Eisenhower saw things as they were and called them as such. He didn’t offer any “spin” to make himself and his administration look good. He didn’t run hateful re-election campaigns. He never had to. Did he make some mistakes as President? He certainly did, and, when he made them, he owned them  immediately and shouldered the consequences. One of those mistakes was allowing the Republican Party to push Richard Nixon into the Vice Presidency. Between Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, we spanned three decades of dishonesty and deceit in the White House (Executive Branch), much to the detriment of this Country.

   By the Nineteen-Seventies, we were being fed a constant stream of “choices” that started the downward spiral that has led us to this point; a point of almost no return. The Democrats offered us Jimmy Carter. He knew a thing or two about peanuts, but he didn’t know peanuts about running a Nation. The Republicans then chimed in the Nineteen-Eighties with Ronald Reagan. He talked the talk, but his wife Nancy who seemed to be at the helm, more often than not. The Republicans kept the ball rolling with someone who thought we could all lip read, and also see his thousand points of light. No, it wasn’t Merlin the Magician. It was George Herbert Walker Bush.
   The Nineteen-Nineties brought us an era that saw our Federal Government go from the red into the black with another Democrat; William “Slick Willie” Clinton. It helps to remember that the Federal Government does not deal in actual dollars and cents. All their “economics” boil down to an incredible number of Accountants writing numbers on pieces of paper. There is no hard currency to back those numbers up. Given that, I now realize how one might be able to cook the books just the right way to “create” a surplus of funds in our National Treasury. Isn’t it a bit odd the way that surplus disappeared overnight?  And, how about that North American Free Trade Agreement? Our manufacturing base started running for the borders, as the rest of the industrialized world looked on in amazement. They all wanted to ride the Gravy Train that was the pillar of our National structure. Slowly, but surely, they did.

   Along came good old “Y-2-K”. The computers didn’t crash. Our ability to manufacture goods and services started hemorrhaging from every corner of the Country. We were blessed by the Republicans with the second coming of the Bush family. As “Rome” burned for eight wonderful years, George “the Big W” Bush put his feet up in the Oval Office, and fiddled away as one of our favorite “Dicks” ran things from behind the curtain. By the year two thousand and eight, we all know where that got us. Then the Democrats offered us an unusual man. He was a man, tall and lanky in stature, who had the ability to talk to large groups of citizens and give them some hope for a better future. Barak Hussein Obama has had four years now to right the ship of state. He has met with some pretty stiff odds while managing to have an impressive “legislative” record. He has been able to invoke “Executive Power” to enact some of the most sweeping Social, Military, Financial, and International changes this Country has seen since the Equal Rights Movement of the Nineteen-Sixties. This man took the proverbial lemons of a modern day Depression, and turned them into lemon-aide in four short  years. If, indeed, he gets another four years to ply his trade, we stand a very good chance of recovering what we lost in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century, and be back on our way to Peace and Prosperity.