Are We There Yet?

[babylonsister]

http://www.politicalgarbagechute.com/are-we-there-yet/

Are We There Yet?
October 20, 2012
by James Schlarmann

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Conservatives are near sighted and impatient.

The fact is that you can’t legislate effectively while looking too far backward or too far forward. But if there’s one thing that’s even more dangerous in politics, it’s when a party focuses all of their collective energies on the moment we’re living in now. Granted, you can’t govern or legislate if you aren’t in tune with the issues of the day, but what’s happened to the Republican party is that they’ve become so impatient and so demanding to fix the issues right now, that they’re refusing to look at the big picture at all. The irony therein of course is that much of the problem we’re seeing now is that they’ve dug their heels in for the last two years, and now they’re trying to convince the country that Obama’s not working fast enough.

That is, essentially the indictment that the GOP is trying to pin on President Obama; that he’s just not working fast enough. Who else does that sound like? That’s right, once again Republicans are taking on the tone of an impatient six-year-old in the backseat of their family’s station wagon, incessantly asking if “we’re there yet.” President Clinton in September, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” reiterated what he’d told the country during his DNC speech in Charlotte. In his opinion, no man who’d ever held the office of the presidency could have turned the country’s economy around in four years…no one.

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So they tell us what really should happen is that the rich shouldn’t be asked to pay more, government should spend less. “Okay,” we tell them, “let’s start with Defense.” They cry foul. They tell us we’re naive and then question our patriotism because we don’t feel the country needs to spend so much of its GDP on war when we do have so many people struggling to make ends meet. It sounds simplistic, but I saw a protest sign at some rally or another while Google image searching such things. This sign’s message really hit home. The sign said, “Why is there always money for war, but not for medicine and food?”

The reason is simple. Republican shortsightedness. It’s better to have a million bombs you’ll never use, than to feed a million children who could grow up and help make war obsolete altogether.