Yes, I know isitjustme has been silent since mid May but really, how do you top "Obama Beats Weiner"? Honestly, the only way this story gets better is if Anthony Weiner marries Anita Baker. (See what happens once you get started?) When the jokes write themselves, don't interfere.
Anyway, as the summer rolls forward, aging white Americans have mothballed their tricorn hats. During the lull, serious law makers from both parties try to hammer out a few spending cuts and raise the country's debt ceiling. The argument revolves around whether we are in this fiscal fix due to Bush's wars and his unfunded tax cuts (we are) or, because of President Obama's stimulus and bailouts (maybe so). How or why is hardly the point at this juncture. Throwing rocks at the problem isn't the same as fixing it. The unrealistic notion that the cure won't leave a bad taste is just that; unrealistic.
Still, the rhetoric of the last two years has brought into focus a fundamental change in the attitude of a large portion of the population. The harmless chiding of Washington made famous by the likes of Will Rogers has morphed into a poisonous hatred of all things government. Europeans understand that their leaders, for all their faults, are trying to run their countries for the well-being of all. They have an understanding that government exists for a purpose and that purpose is beneficial. Germans in the 30's looked to their leaders to extract them from a horrible depression. OK that didn't work out so well but even today Germans don't hate their government.
In an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Barone postulates that Americans who lived through World War II had an abiding faith in government's ability to perform miracles. He feels faith was eroded in future generations because of scandals like Watergate and the Vietnam War. (While Vietnam might have convinced America that government couldn't be trusted, it's unlikely that the war protesters of 1968 are the teabaggers of 2010.) Where Mr. Barone and I part ways is his belief that the country has (correctly) decided that big government no longer works. My view is that America (read older, white rural America) has been fed a steady diet of bile from the right and has finally decided that their government is their enemy. Not just a bunch of mildly corrupt vote chasers who routinely get governing wrong but evil, sinister, fifth columnists who mean to destroy the very Country they were elected to serve.
Don't take my word for this. Ask your favorite right-winger what he or she thinks of Nancy Pelosi...but don't do it with small children within ear-shot. The kind of venomous hate directed at the former speaker is usually reserved for Osama Bin Laden. Who taught Americans to hate like that? Not Congress. They fuss and fume but the invectives are directed at policy not people. America is being systematically taught to hate its own government. The Hannitys, Becks and Limbaughs of the media have successfully indoctrinated a substantial portion of the population to believe that they are under attack. This drek was harmless enough in the Bush years because the right-wing masses could console themselves with the notion that one of their own was in the White House.
That ended with the horror of horrors: a black liberal of questionable lineage was elected President. Limbaugh must have thought he died and went to heaven. His hoard was prepared to believe almost anything about this "outsider". "He's clearly not one of us." Fox news hired every conservative with a pulse, and a few without. Roger Ailes, lord of Fox News, sent his minions to cover every gathering of disaffected white people yelling about taking back the country.
So here we are. Republicans in Congress have to be smuggled into meetings with the opposition for fear of being called traitors. Compromise, once the hallmark of intelligent government, is now a dirty word. Legislators willing to accept the bizarre notion that someone else might have an idea worth pursuing are cruising for a primary challenge in their next election. Moderates like Tim Pawlenty and even Newt Gingrich must be willing to stifle any hint of accommodation to reality. A step away from orthodoxy will draw immediate withering rebuke from the screamers in talk radio as well as mindless bomb-throwers like Sarah Palin. (Sarah doesn't really care about the Republican party. Headlines and book sales are all that matter.)
America needs a civics lesson. In his famous comic strip Pogo, Walt Kelly wrote "We have met the enemy and he is us". We have been told to fear debt, debt ceilings and deficits. Why?...we have no idea. How do we fix it?...cut spending. How?...we have no idea. We could raise taxes a little. That worked in the Clinton years. Well, good luck with that. We could cut defense spending and stop being the world's policeman. Nice idea if you can get by-in from Hannity.
The solutions, if they're out there, will come from compromise. Smart men and women will sit down and hammer out a deal that no one will love. They will then have to vote for the deal and stand up in their districts and defend being an responsible adult. Their detractors will be pundits and commentators who have never governed anything. Some of those legislators will lose but at least they did the right thing. That's a civics lesson.
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