When asked why he painted his face to look like a "devil" for a hockey game on a Seinfeld episode, character David Puddy replied, "You gotta support the team." In the end, whether the Packers or Steelers won this year’s Super Bowl the outcome did not change our lives in any meaningful way. Unfortunately, if you substitute the word “vote” for “root” you will find that quite often, U.S. voters treat the Democratic and Republican parties too much like their favorite sports teams. The problem is these two political parties are responsible for either retaining or changing policies that will literally define the forces controlling many generations of American lives. Clearly both parties command much more loyalty than they have earned.
Just look at the list of some of the most popular justifications offered by citizens blindly loyal to the Democratic Party, when they explained why they could not stomach George W. Bush. His "reckless deficit spending and borrowing" topped most lists. Bush's federal budget deficits promptly soared to $400 billion dollars in the years following the 9-11 attacks. And according to those loyal to the Democratic Party, those borrowing levels were simply intolerable. Then of course there was the terrible Bush military incursion to remove an evil Middle Eastern dictator who had massacred his own people.
The Bush policy of affecting a regime change in Iraq was labeled “arrogant U.S. imperialism,” if not worse, by those loyal to the Democratic Party. And several years later when Bush realized he would have to implement the so-called troop “surge” in Iraq, again those loyal to the Democratic Party scoffed and accused him of being in reckless denial of reality. Of course those loyal the Republican Party disagreed with all of these arguments against all of these policies. After 8 years of Bush in the White House, America has now seen 26 months of policy making by President Barack Obama. Have the objections to Bush policies been met with new policies? Obama has presided over the largest two-year federal budget deficit and borrowing binge totals in the history of human civilization.
And while those loyal to the Republican Party have suddenly found reason to scream fiscal bloody murder, those loyal to the Democratic Party have also done a 180 degree flip and are now mute on the skyrocketing borrowing insanity in Washington. As the "new" Commander in Chief, President Obama continued to wind down U.S. troop involvement in Iraq. Then he suddenly called for and executed a massive troop “surge” in Afghanistan. And just a couple of years after those loyal to the Democratic Party were blasting the Bush troop “surge” policies they turned mute on Obama’s troop surge. Ironically, Senator Obama was one of the harshest critics of all of Bush’s military policies. And those criticisms helped catapult him into the White House. Now we are discovering that Senator and President Obama are two different people.
Astonishingly, Senator Dove has become President Hawk. Obama has opened up a third U.S. military engagement front in the Middle East. In justifying an attack on Libya, Obama eerily finds himself citing strangely familiar and Bush-like reasons for his actions. And why doesn’t Obama close Guantanamo, as he promised to those loyal to the Democratic Party? Again his explanations are Bush-like. And Democratic Party loyalist's responses now that it is Obama’s Guantanamo instead of Bush’s? Like football fans that just saw their team give up three touchdowns to the opponents in five minutes, the Democratic loyalist response is deafening silence. One can only figure these political Puddies feel they "Gotta support the team."
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| Weiner |
After suggesting the Bush administration was in bed with special interests on the domestic policy front, the signature accomplishment of the Obama administration has been the so-called Obamacare legislation. Yet quietly, there have already been more than 1,040 waiver exemptions granted to various Obama friendly entities who say the law is fatally flawed.
The latest indication that Obamacare won’t work comes from Congressional Obamacare author Anthony Weiner, who says he may seek yet another waiver for New York City. This can only lend credence to the Orwell adage that most Marxists truly believe it is reasonable to say that “All pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than others.” After eight years of intellectually duplicitous criticism from loyalists in both parties of the other “team” U.S. citizens now find American troops in harm’s way on three different fronts, a federal borrowing binge that is more than triple those of the Bush era, and unemployment rates that rival those of the darkest days of Jimmy Carter.
This independent thinks it is time for everyone to consider getting off of the habit of mindlessly supporting either the Democrat or Republican Party "teams." Americans must stop face painting like David Puddy. It’s time to support best practices and only leaders who are intellectually honest. Self-serving teams like the Democratic Party and the Republican Party don't have policies. They merely blow with the winds. If we oppose the idea that the U.S. should be acting as the global police, the biggest borrowers in history, and an entitlement nation that thinks government is the solution rather than the problem, continuing to be a Democratic or Republican Party loyalist is the last thing we should be doing.
Do We "Gotta Support the Team?"
From Freedom Politics - by Thomas Sowell - Random Thoughts - Economists are often asked to predict what the economy is going to do. But economic predictions require predicting what politicians are going to do-- and nothing is more unpredictable. An e-mail from a perceptive reader points out that, although Congressional "earmarks" represent a very small part of federal spending, they can be used as bribes to buy the votes of members of Congress on bills involving the spending of vastly larger sums of the taxpayers' money. When the Federal Reserve cites statistics to claim that there is not much evidence of inflation, we need to keep in mind that the statistics they rely on exclude food and energy prices. The cost of living is no sweat if you can do without electricity and food. The mainstream media never expressed half the outrage about Mao Zedong as they did about Ronald Reagan. Yet, when it came to killing millions of innocent civilians, even Hitler was an amateur compared to Mao. Safety advocates who say that we shouldn't take chances, but should ban things that might be unsafe, don't seem to understand that if we banned every food to which somebody had an allergy we could all starve to death. Read Sowell Column
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