I don’t plan to always run the Republicans down in this space. Seriously, I don’t. Don’t think that I dislike the GOP but silently endorse the Democrats. I dislike both with equal vigor, thank you very much.
But sometimes, you have to strike while the iron is hot, and the GOP “Pledge to America” is just the kind of thing that burns bright.
I don’t really care for the Pledge’s ideas about the economy and how to create jobs. Surely they’ll just pass a big bill that will fix everything. It’ll be big, pricey and ultimately ineffective.
But anyway, let’s talk about the deficit. Quoting directly from the text of the Pledge:
“There is no reason to wait to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending.”
Wow guys. I completely agree. I recommend starting with the auditing the Federal Reserve so we can see what they’ve been up to.
We can trim some fat from the military budget (have you seen that thing? I’m certain you could cut huge sums out and never touch a single soldier. Talk about pork) and we could end that ridiculous TARP thing.
“Only in Washington is there an expectation that whatever your budget was last year, it will be more this year and even more the next.”
Yeah, tell me about it. It’s almost like it’s been that way forever. Oh. Right. Which doesn’t mean that I’m okay with that, just that I doubt the GOP will actually, you know, reduce spending in a meaningful way.
Let’s move on from the deficit portion to the national security portion. This is where it’ll get good.
“Foreign terrorists do not have the same rights as American citizens, nor do they have more rights than U.S. military personnel.”
Do American citizens have rights? I’m not even sure. At one point in the Pledge, the GOP claims to want to restore the prominence (my words) of the Tenth Amendment, which basically says any powers not expressly given to the government belongs to the people.
I support such an idea. The Constitution is good. But I must ask you, GOP, what about the Fourth Amendment? You know, the “search-and-seizure” one. The one that says that you can’t spy on me or track my car or what have you.
Look, it’s fine to want to undo what the Obama administration has done. I vehemently support such a notion. But I get the feeling that all you want to do is roll things back to Jan. 19 of 2009. If so, then what’s the freaking point?
That’s the thing that gets me with our crop of politicians. No one wants change in a real sense; they only want change to back when the party they represent was in power.
John Boehner and company doesn’t want to restore power to the Constitution or rework our dangerous foreign policy or work on reducing the debt, no. They want to simply undo whatever Obama has done, go back to the Bush-era levels and go from there.
Folks, that isn’t good enough.
Maybe the GOP wins back the Congress and starts doing good things. But the idea that our problems are Democratic creations (or in the eyes of the Democrats, merely GOP in origin) is ignorant and leads to this environment where the only change discussed is changing back into what we were 15 minutes ago.
But 15 minutes ago sucked pretty bad too.