No Vote Of Confidence

There were mixed reviews from my readership on the relevancy of political posts. Perhaps the following bit of political flexibility will be refreshing to those who don’t agree with my political punditry, and eye-opening to those who like political posts and also likely agree with most of my views.

This is difficult for me, but here is what I want to say: the republicans don’t deserve to run our government past this November.

This isn’t to suggest the democrats will do any better. But republicans have simply done nothing to warrant a mandate to lead any longer, and a few years on the back bench may be about the only thing that will wake them up. And even on this I am not sure, as their inability to lead in even minimal ways is impossible to notice.

While it can be said that Congressional (or at least House) republicans stopped the president (and democrats) on a hopeless immigration policy, they were neither forceful nor consistent in doing so. I can’t even be sure they would have stopped the immigration lunacy if the public and talk radio hadn’t made so much noise that it eventually drowned out the terribly misguided marches for what essentially was illegal immigration. And the worse part of it was, they had to override the president – the top of their own party – just to give us what we already have: one very lousy immigration policy.

On the issue of rising fuel costs, the republicans are AWOL too. How many people would have given the president and republicans a pat on the back if only they had suggested a Manhattan-Project-like program to find alternative sources for energy? We built a city in Tennessee and then an atomic bomb in 23 months, why on earth haven’t we been able to find something other then dead dinosaur innards to put in our gas tanks? There has been absolutely no leadership from republicans on alternative energy and instead, it looks to the average person like republicans are only protecting their Big Oil friends.

When President Bush took office, he inherited a budget surplus and an economy that was creating jobs. Sure, the dot com bubble had just burst to be shortly replaced by the mortgage-based economy and subsequent burst, but false economies aside, the federal purse was overflowing in early 2001. Five budgets later and we’re back in the hole to the tune of trillions of dollars as the republican-led Congress and our compassionate conservative president have spent like drunken sailors. Yes the war on terror has cost money and yes our economy took a hit following 9/11, but there is no excuse for the kinds of excess spending that has occurred on the republican’s watch.

Perhaps the most disheartening turn in the party has been in its truly whacko foreign policy. From Iraq to Lebanon to Latin America, it’s like watching the Seinfeld episode when Elaine is in the Bizarro World. The push has been for democratization but instead of getting freely elected, friendly governments, we’ve legitimized terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, radical groups in Iraq and Iran, and propped up fraudulent governments in Ukraine, Republic of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. At the same time we have continued to get into bed with heartless dictators because of the tired policy that states, “an enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine.”

The republicans think the wolf is at the door in the Middle East but they don’t seem to notice that the wolf has opened the back door and moved in to the spare bedroom in Latin America. Hugo Chavez has turned Latin America into his own political experiment and we do nothing as one country after another falls into his leftist camp. Well, we seem to have one response to our neighbors to the south. We tell them if they don’t like it down there, we’ll always have room for more up here.

Perhaps the final foreign policy blunder is the monumentally stupid U.N. resolution introducing an international peacekeeping force into Southern Lebanon. This will go down in history as a treaty of appeasement unseen since Munich in 1938. The cast will have changed with Bush playing the role of Neville Chamberlain and the rest of the world as French President Daladier, but the result will be the same: the world will have given in to a weaker power for the sake of pretending we have peace in our time.

You have to know you have a bad deal when you are in the midst of self-congratulation with the French while people in Iran, Syria, Palestine, and southern Lebanon are declaring victory. You think you would notice this if you were the president and his Secretary of State, who continues her live version of the Peter Principle with each passing day. Secretary Rice even had the gal to say the worthless U.N. resolution does not envision the disarming of Hezbollah, which is nothing more than a proxy militia of Syria and Iran. And she said this without a hint of laughter. Of course the ink was barely dry on U.N. Resolution 1559 – proclaiming Hezbollah must be disarmed – before it was washed from the memory of the diplomatic dilettantes in the world.

The state of leadership in the world stinks right now and I’m afraid that President Bush and his fellow republicans are the stinkees. I have no faith in the democrats to do a better job, but they at least seem eager (perhaps the word is “drooling”) to lead again. So let them. Let’s see them put their plans into action. I often wonder what the world would look like today had 250 voters had a sudden change of heart in Florida back in 2000. With Gore as president, what would he have done after 9/11? Would our women be wearing burkas by now or would Gore simply have put the terrorists to sleep with a series of harsh rhetorical speeches? Who knows, but it is an honor to be given a mandate by the voters to lead and not to be taken for granted. The republicans seem to take us for granted and deserve to be taken into the political woodshed for a spell to learn a hard and painful lesson.