In the distant times of some 30-odd years ago, I put together a political science/government degree, as a requirement to get a commission in the U.S. Army.
Along the way, I attended a variety of classes, which were designed to teach aspiring political scientists how our government was supposed to work. It has been a very, very, difficult lesson to discover…, that the professors at the University of Washington and Eastern Washington University were apparently dealing in fantasy.
Theoretically, our country has a two-party system. There are those out there who don’t particularly like that system, and I’m reasonably sure that their numbers increased geometrically over the latest idiocy in the House of Representatives. I can’t say that I blame them.
I’m not particularly interested in going off on a tangent about proportional representation or any of the other exotic methods that actually seem to be a truer form up representational democracy. The advantages of that and how that likely could have avoided this stupidity from happening is perhaps grist for another post.
As a senior at the University, I was enthralled by what we were being taught in these 400 level classes. There was a simplicity to it, a beauty… a flow, if you will. And as events since the first of the month have taught us, very little of it was true.
Is it perhaps, too late, to actually request a refund from the schools?
The health of our government system depends on two separate and distinct political parties, based on the framework that we have in place now. We no longer have two separate and distinct parties. We have one political party, the Democrats, and we have an extension of the Democrats who used to be called Republicans.
Now, they’re just called “Democrat–lite.”
I’ve been involved in politics for some 25 years now, at one level or another. There are people from all over the political spectrum that read my meager effort here. I am visited on a daily basis by staff, (presumably staff), from both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Every one of them is aware of how our government system is supposed to work. And every one of them is aware that it’s not working.
The leadership of the House of Representatives can’t seem to find a single testicle between the lot of them.
I warned, early on, that the only way to make this effort a success was to see it through.
In military terms, and I see many things in military terms, you can’t invade the enemy’s coast with any other expectation, except victory. If you do not expect victory, then you do not invade. Because if you invade with a mindset that expects anything but victory, then all you’re doing is getting your troops slaughtered for nothing. And that’s what happened here.
How dare Speaker Boehner launch an attack like this, with no intention of winning? How dare he put the Party at risk, for his apparent ego trip?
What did he hope to accomplish? And a better question was with his cave –in on this issue, what did he accomplish?
What was the goal here? Was it to become another political piñata, much like Newt Gingrich?
Because if that was the goal, Boehner pulled it off brilliantly.
The cowardice of the Republican Party at the federal level is both legendary… And disheartening.
Memo to Speaker Boehner: this is a fucking war. This isn’t your golf game. This isn’t a tuneup. This is combat. And the collateral damage is the 300,000,000+ Americans you sold out by enabling McConnell and the rest of the RINOs to get their own way. Well guess what Mr. Speaker… When you look, act, speak, and vote, like a RINO?
You're a RINO.
At one point, back in the 2000, I was holding down the chair of the executive director for the Washington State GOP. I had this bizarre idea sitting there, that I’d achieved a great political goal. That I had arrived at the big time. And now I was going to see, from the top down, how this wonderful GOP machinery was going to work, and how everyone was going to pull together to get Republicans elected.
Nothing… Nothing… Nothing… Could have been further from the truth.
There’s a reason that the GOP is losing ground nationwide and through extension, worldwide.
There’s a reason that the worst president in the history of this country was reelected in 2012.
The GOP has no vision, no plan, no ability, no idea, and no stomach for how to wage political war.
Instead, we get people like John Boehner. Who, believe me, has brought me to tears much more than he’s brought himself.
I used to be a hard-core Republican. I used to refuse to vote for anything with the D label…. Though my tenure with the Washington GOP changed all that. And, after last night, I have to ask myself: “what the hell difference does it make?”
If the GOP in the Senate and in the House of Representatives is just going to give the president everything he wants to begin with, then why the hell even have a Congress?
Seriously… What is the point?
Nothing was accomplished by this hissy fit. Spending wasn’t cut. Debt wasn’t reduced. In fact, both of those things were increased.
That plays directly into my meme that: both parties want us to dive off the cliff head first… the only question is which party wants us to get to the edge the fastest.
And there IS an cliff out there, ladies and gentlemen. A cliff that we do not want to go over. But there is an inevitability about it all; and what are we going to do about the debt that we’re leaving for our children?
For the next several years, the Democrats will now point to this debacle as yet another sign of the irrational GOP. And who can argue with that? What was rational about taking this tact, only to give up? What did we accomplish? How is our country better off now, than it would’ve been if they had just caved to begin with?
Because it’s not like they haven’t caved in the past… Repeatedly. The pattern has been set in concrete: there is no strategy the Republicans can actually engage in because the Democrats know that at the end of the day?
The GOP is going to cave.
So here’s the thing: since the GOP are willing participants, bent on turning this into Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, why don’t we just save a butt-load of money, and just eliminate the waste that is Congress altogether?
John Boehner has made the House of Representatives about as useful as a doorstop, and about as easy to kick out of the way.
So why are we wasting our time and our money? The president governs by edict, known as “executive order” and Congress doesn't do anything about that. He violates our laws with impunity, he has us surfing on this bubble and the clowns in both the Senate and the House refused to acknowledge that the bubbles will burst one of these days.
And what happens then?
We have become a people that values “stuff” over freedom. And there will come a day when the wailing and gnashing of teeth will be heard throughout the land as a result. History will be rewritten, so that the giants of America… The George Washington’s, the Abraham Lincoln’s, the Ronald Reagan’s, won’t even be a memory.
Instead, will have “heroes” like Barack Insane Obama.
I’m reminded of a situation that bubbled to the surface in the bucolic dorf known as Wenatchee. Couple of years ago they found out that they weren’t going to be making enough money on their Cadillac Civic Center, (actually, it was a Toyota Town Center.) A monument to small-town government’s gullibility, they discovered that they were going to have to default on the construction bonds. You know... what we'd have to do around here locally if the Pollard Hilton didn't get government subsidies?
There was a great many machinations about all of that… For example. I recall the headline from the Wenatchee world newspaper:
“Why didn't somebody stop us?”
Why didn't the GOP act like adults? Why did the GOP allow this to happen? Why didn’t the GOP do something? After all, isn't that what they’re there for?
And in the end, it will all of been meaningless.
Like the great empires in the past, the United States will turn to the dust.… A curiosity for future generations to marvel over and ponder…
How can a country that was once so great, have fallen so far?
Along the way, I attended a variety of classes, which were designed to teach aspiring political scientists how our government was supposed to work. It has been a very, very, difficult lesson to discover…, that the professors at the University of Washington and Eastern Washington University were apparently dealing in fantasy.
Theoretically, our country has a two-party system. There are those out there who don’t particularly like that system, and I’m reasonably sure that their numbers increased geometrically over the latest idiocy in the House of Representatives. I can’t say that I blame them.
I’m not particularly interested in going off on a tangent about proportional representation or any of the other exotic methods that actually seem to be a truer form up representational democracy. The advantages of that and how that likely could have avoided this stupidity from happening is perhaps grist for another post.
As a senior at the University, I was enthralled by what we were being taught in these 400 level classes. There was a simplicity to it, a beauty… a flow, if you will. And as events since the first of the month have taught us, very little of it was true.
Is it perhaps, too late, to actually request a refund from the schools?
The health of our government system depends on two separate and distinct political parties, based on the framework that we have in place now. We no longer have two separate and distinct parties. We have one political party, the Democrats, and we have an extension of the Democrats who used to be called Republicans.
Now, they’re just called “Democrat–lite.”
I’ve been involved in politics for some 25 years now, at one level or another. There are people from all over the political spectrum that read my meager effort here. I am visited on a daily basis by staff, (presumably staff), from both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Every one of them is aware of how our government system is supposed to work. And every one of them is aware that it’s not working.
The leadership of the House of Representatives can’t seem to find a single testicle between the lot of them.
I warned, early on, that the only way to make this effort a success was to see it through.
In military terms, and I see many things in military terms, you can’t invade the enemy’s coast with any other expectation, except victory. If you do not expect victory, then you do not invade. Because if you invade with a mindset that expects anything but victory, then all you’re doing is getting your troops slaughtered for nothing. And that’s what happened here.
How dare Speaker Boehner launch an attack like this, with no intention of winning? How dare he put the Party at risk, for his apparent ego trip?
What did he hope to accomplish? And a better question was with his cave –in on this issue, what did he accomplish?
What was the goal here? Was it to become another political piñata, much like Newt Gingrich?
Because if that was the goal, Boehner pulled it off brilliantly.
The cowardice of the Republican Party at the federal level is both legendary… And disheartening.
Memo to Speaker Boehner: this is a fucking war. This isn’t your golf game. This isn’t a tuneup. This is combat. And the collateral damage is the 300,000,000+ Americans you sold out by enabling McConnell and the rest of the RINOs to get their own way. Well guess what Mr. Speaker… When you look, act, speak, and vote, like a RINO?
You're a RINO.
At one point, back in the 2000, I was holding down the chair of the executive director for the Washington State GOP. I had this bizarre idea sitting there, that I’d achieved a great political goal. That I had arrived at the big time. And now I was going to see, from the top down, how this wonderful GOP machinery was going to work, and how everyone was going to pull together to get Republicans elected.
Nothing… Nothing… Nothing… Could have been further from the truth.
There’s a reason that the GOP is losing ground nationwide and through extension, worldwide.
There’s a reason that the worst president in the history of this country was reelected in 2012.
The GOP has no vision, no plan, no ability, no idea, and no stomach for how to wage political war.
Instead, we get people like John Boehner. Who, believe me, has brought me to tears much more than he’s brought himself.
I used to be a hard-core Republican. I used to refuse to vote for anything with the D label…. Though my tenure with the Washington GOP changed all that. And, after last night, I have to ask myself: “what the hell difference does it make?”
If the GOP in the Senate and in the House of Representatives is just going to give the president everything he wants to begin with, then why the hell even have a Congress?
Seriously… What is the point?
Nothing was accomplished by this hissy fit. Spending wasn’t cut. Debt wasn’t reduced. In fact, both of those things were increased.
That plays directly into my meme that: both parties want us to dive off the cliff head first… the only question is which party wants us to get to the edge the fastest.
And there IS an cliff out there, ladies and gentlemen. A cliff that we do not want to go over. But there is an inevitability about it all; and what are we going to do about the debt that we’re leaving for our children?
For the next several years, the Democrats will now point to this debacle as yet another sign of the irrational GOP. And who can argue with that? What was rational about taking this tact, only to give up? What did we accomplish? How is our country better off now, than it would’ve been if they had just caved to begin with?
Because it’s not like they haven’t caved in the past… Repeatedly. The pattern has been set in concrete: there is no strategy the Republicans can actually engage in because the Democrats know that at the end of the day?
The GOP is going to cave.
So here’s the thing: since the GOP are willing participants, bent on turning this into Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, why don’t we just save a butt-load of money, and just eliminate the waste that is Congress altogether?
John Boehner has made the House of Representatives about as useful as a doorstop, and about as easy to kick out of the way.
So why are we wasting our time and our money? The president governs by edict, known as “executive order” and Congress doesn't do anything about that. He violates our laws with impunity, he has us surfing on this bubble and the clowns in both the Senate and the House refused to acknowledge that the bubbles will burst one of these days.
And what happens then?
We have become a people that values “stuff” over freedom. And there will come a day when the wailing and gnashing of teeth will be heard throughout the land as a result. History will be rewritten, so that the giants of America… The George Washington’s, the Abraham Lincoln’s, the Ronald Reagan’s, won’t even be a memory.
Instead, will have “heroes” like Barack Insane Obama.
I’m reminded of a situation that bubbled to the surface in the bucolic dorf known as Wenatchee. Couple of years ago they found out that they weren’t going to be making enough money on their Cadillac Civic Center, (actually, it was a Toyota Town Center.) A monument to small-town government’s gullibility, they discovered that they were going to have to default on the construction bonds. You know... what we'd have to do around here locally if the Pollard Hilton didn't get government subsidies?
There was a great many machinations about all of that… For example. I recall the headline from the Wenatchee world newspaper:
Someone should have stopped us
Wenatchee World Editorial Board
Saturday, December 10, 2011
If only ...
If only someone with sense and financial acuity could have dug through the wishful thinking and pipe dreams and told us it wasn't going to work. Maybe a quick dose of sobriety might have saved us, and we would not have built Town Toyota Center. We would not be saddled with a $42 million debt and no means to pay it. We could not be blamed for financial contagion or embarrassed by our foolishness, lack of foresight, empty due diligence, poor judgment and pending insolvency. Maybe we would not be waiting for the lawyers of the world to scour us clean to satisfy part of our horrid debt. If only ...
But there wasn't anybody to save us from ourselves, not really. There were people who could see it coming, who knew that fanciful numbers that pop out of developer’s heads are no substitute for cold truth and analysis, and that we were taking an enormous risk. Their voices were soft, drowned in civic enthusiasm for near impossibilities. There was no state agency, experienced in budgetary analysis and municipal finance, to say, hey, wait a minute, 4,200-seat arenas don’t make million-dollar profits. It is wrong, risky and dangerous to borrow money on the assumption they will. The state treasurer does not have that in his job description. The state auditor can tell you you’re wrong after you do it.
This may change with a small and little-noticed bill introduced last week by Sen. Ed Murray, chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, and co-sponsored by Sen. Linda Evans Parlette and a bipartisan array of others. It would require an “independent financial feasibility review” before a public facilities district is formed, before it issues public debt, and before it buys or builds a facility. The review would be performed by Department of Commerce Municipal Research and Services Center. “The review must examine the potential costs to be incurred by the public facility district and the adequacy of revenues to meet those costs.”
This is an excellent idea. As much as it pains us to say it, we should cheer anything that makes it harder to be another Wenatchee.
This is the opinion of The Wenatchee World and its Editorial Board: Publisher Rufus Woods, Editor Cal FitzSimmons, Chief Financial Officer Janine Bakken and Editorial Page Editor Tracy Warner.And that, ladies and gentlemen, is going to be a headline at some point… The inscription on this nation’s tombstone… relatively soon, that will apply to the entirety of the collapse of our country.
“Why didn't somebody stop us?”
Why didn't the GOP act like adults? Why did the GOP allow this to happen? Why didn’t the GOP do something? After all, isn't that what they’re there for?
And in the end, it will all of been meaningless.
Like the great empires in the past, the United States will turn to the dust.… A curiosity for future generations to marvel over and ponder…
How can a country that was once so great, have fallen so far?
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