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.
