Our politics have become so dishonest and corrupt that, to be honest, I really don’t even care if they shut the government down or not.
Barack Obama and Harry Reid engineer crisis governance because it suits them. It has allowed them to break the seals on presidential power without triggering a full constitutional crisis. It has allowed them to spend trillions of dollars without being held accountable for a penny of it. It allows Obama to engineer running battles in the media that play to the Democrat base. If not for crisis governance, what would Obama be doing? What else would he be talking about?
When he gives speeches lately, he talks mainly about two things: How evil Republicans are (because they oppose him in his engineered crises), and how evil guns are. Whatever. It’s just static while he tweaks the bureaucracy to kill off the economy, drive up dependence on government, and cement Democrat one-party rule. I’m not saying that he’ll achieve that, but it is his aim. He wants unchecked power.
On the other side, the Republican Party is not a conservative party. It is home to conservatives because Democrats hate conservatives, not because the GOP hierarchy loves conservatives or is truly conservative itself. From the time of Goldwater through Reagan to today, the Republican Party does its best to mollify the real right while minimizing its real influence. It nominates milquetoasts and expects us to swoon and fight to our dying breath. It makes backroom deals designed to preserves its own spoils at the expense of principle. Its lack of tactical acumen combines with its lack of principles to produce an indifferent shrug in me. So Barack Obama has created more conservatives than he has jobs. If the GOP wants to do something useful with that information, well, what is it waiting for?
We have a government now that lies to us about everything while its fiscal irresponsibility is driving us off a cliff at 100 miles per hour. Ok, maybe 99.8 miles per hour after the “sequestration.” My generation is probably not going to reap the supposed benefits of the cradle-to-grave welfare state because it will be bankrupt by the time we get to retirement age if it is not fixed soon. There is no means to fix it in the Obama Age of Irresponsible Crisis Governance. He is the worst, most dishonest, most ideologically-driven president America has ever had. He is enabled by one party that celebrates evil, and by one party that lacks a clue while it tries to strangle its own leaders from behind.
The “shutdown” now staring us in the face mostly impacts “non-essential” workers and things like the National Zoo’s PandaCam. Do I care? No, I do not. “Non-essential” federal workers don’t deserve an Obamacare carve-out that you and I don’t get. They may not even deserve their jobs, being “non-essential” and all. As for the PandaCam, how about we make it a subscription service that pays for itself? If it fails to pay for itself, it goes away.
The president who promised to go through the budget line by line to root out waste was just lying about that. He had no intention of doing that. It was just a useful lie that helped him into the power required to make government even more dishonest and wasteful. He never met a federal penny spent that he did not love. He never met a government power that he did not want expanded. He never met a government bureaucracy that he did not want to turn into a partisan weapon.
We need a serious, fundamental reset in this country — back to our roots and to a modest government that lives within its means and its legal boundaries. Neither party is capable of delivering that. Neither party really wants to. Both are clinging hard to the last scraps of an imploding leviathan state. Misery is inevitable. We may as well get on with it if only to save the next generation from our own foolish decisions. If that’s still possible.
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