The White House has responded to Alberto Gonzales’ contempt of Congress by calling Congress "pathetic."http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19962268/
And guess what? Bush is right. Congress is as pathetic as a Craig’s list whore. (To bring the metaphor home: http://austin.craigslist.org/ers/381682063.html)
This Congress may be the largest collection of wimps, crybabies and sycophants the world has ever seen. In response, Congress will do nothing. That’s what they’re good at. They don’t have the willpower or the leadership to take on the President. Which is rather odd considering that Bush’s popularity is less than 30%. Oh, they’ll posture, proclaim their righteousness, blabber on about gays getting married and then hit D.C. for a night on the town. What else can they do?
They could look toward family values again and then divorce their wives. Or, they could keep gays from being married. Or, they could jail 11 million illegal immigrants even though we can barely jail the criminals we have now. My point is, I don’t think they’re looking hard enough into what they can do that won’t matter. We need more pie-in-the-sky issues. The wall between U.S. and Mexico is a good start. Let’s wrap that all around the U.S. Write your Congressman right now and ask for money for that Highway to nowhere. We can’t ask the Alaskan Congressman Sen. Stevens now because he’s being looked at on bribery charges as of yesterday. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118531999682776863.html
But I’m sure there’s another Republican Senator who will take the bribe.
My own Congressman, Rep. Michael McCaul of the 10th District in Texas is sponsoring a house resolution (HR 2240 and HR 2250) to deny any recompense for the drug dealers that were shot in the back and killed by our border patrol agents. I’m not saying he doesn’t have a point, but is that how he wants to spend his time? Apparently, as a politician, he can’t let the courts handle it because it’s an issue that has no detractors and it’s an easy way to impress his constituency. McCaul wants to spend his short time in Congress fighting battles that no one cares about. I’m guessing he doesn’t read the news. He may not even know that our troops are in the middle of a civil war right now, but if any drug dealer who is shot in the back wants to sue, McCaul is there to stop them with a house resolution. Good for you McCaul. Next, lets sponsor a bill to make English the national language or outlaw flag burning. That way you won’t have to do anything of value. Today’s politician is more about not pissing off the voters than doing anything of value. And McCaul is just that. A politician. Is it too much to ask for a leader? Someone that has a little vision.
McCaul also sponsored HR 2764 - An amendment to increase funding (by transfer) for International Narcotics Control and Law enforcement programs by $30 million. By all means, lets spend more money on an unwinnable war. It doesn’t surprise me. That’s what Republicans do. I find it remarkable that officials can’t keep drugs out of a maximum security prison, but our Congress wants to spend money in a totally impossible task of keeping drugs from coming across our massive borders. McCaul’s heart is in the right place, I just don’t believe he’s thought about this much. Why not spend a hundred billion dollars to secure our borders? Why not a trillion? The only thing this country receives from spending money on the drug war is the expense of incarcerating the never ending supply of drug smugglers. I’ve read that every single prisoner costs the government as much as a college education. I always thought Republicans were against entitlement programs and against big government. We’ve got over 2 million in prison now, and nearly 80% are there on drug charges. This isn’t a cheap endeavor. Every time we catch someone, it’s another $36,000 a year until the end of their sentence, and the drug cartels are finding mules faster than Iraq insurgents are finding suicide bombers.
Anyone that has made the slightest study of how drugs are smuggled understands the problem. Drug lords hire dumb ass poor people, that may not even know what they are carrying, to drive drugs across into America. If they get caught, so what? Their profit margin is so high, they just factor in the 10-20% cost of losing those shipments. Add that to the fact that there is an unknowable number of drug tunnels crossing our borders, and you have to ask why we are even trying. This very month they found three others.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0712border-tunnel0712-ON.html
A couple of years ago the right wing started running ads meant to demonize drug users by insisting that drug money goes to terrorist organizations. The left hit back with the notion that gas users pay money to terrorist organizations. They were both right, and both wrong, but it made a great bullshit campaign. While soft drug money like marijuana probably didn’t fund terrorism, hard drugs like heroin probably does. What I can’t get my head around is, if you wanted to de-fund all terrorists across the globe, you’d legalize drugs. That would end terrorism overnight. But I have never met a politician that doesn’t have a knee jerk reaction to ending prohibition, because they all believe legalization means allowing their children to buy heroin like beer or a pack of cigarettes. It’s as if they can’t envision a system where only pharmacists dispense narcotic drugs to users that meet certain criteria, and therefore keep tough drugs out of the hands of children. It doesn’t occur to our legislators that cigarettes kill more people every year than all of the illegal drugs combined. Apparently, that’s okay with them. More the pity.
I am ripping on Rep. McCaul as an example only because he’s my legislator. In reality, I’ve never met the man. I’m sure he’s a nice guy that is just trying to do the right thing. I can see that from his sponsorship of H.R.3043 - An amendment to reduce appropriations for Departmental Management (by transfer), and redirect $2,000,000 to Special Education. Most politicians are trying to help. My rant is directed at the current mentality our representatives seem to have. Like drug mules, there seems to be a never ending supply of politicians willing to sell out the American people for campaign contributions. Bending their common sense to "dance with the one that brought you." They fight the battles that receive the most press. They posture and strut for C-Span to let their constituents think they are actually working for them. In the end, nothing gets done, and the American people are made to suffer from their knee-jerk reaction to modern problems. Using only ten word answers for debates, they often end up trying to fix problems with these slogans. Problems that, in reality, don’t have an easy answer.
The more I think about it the more I’m convinced, the American people just want at least one thing fixed. That’s why they want an end to the war. I think the public is sick of politicians institutionalizing any problem they can throw money at, as if working on the problem, fixes it. In defense of the politicians, they often have a constituency beating down the door and demanding action on any given issue.
I can’t write about knee-jerk reactions without bringing up WWII in our fight with Japan. Everyone in the U.S. seems content with the notion that using nuclear weapons on Japan was wrong yet necessary. The main argument centers around the millions of American lives it would take to invade Japan. The truth lies in a different place. Near the end of the war we had already killed much more than the atomic bombs did with conventional bombs. 120,000 in Tokyo alone. Their country was a barely alive by the time our nukes were brought to bare. (Something most people already know.) What breaks the argument is our carrier fleet. In 1941, when we took the hit at Pearl Harbor, we had four working carriers in the Pacific. By 1945 we had finished building 25 more carriers, complete with new aircraft, ready to go. The U.S.’s ability to out produce the Japanese was just coming into full swing. In reality, by the end of 1945, we had the ability to destroy the Japanese without nuclear bombs. Truman needed the bomb to force their surrender. But the point I’m trying to make is, if we had sat back and done nothing after Pearl Harbor we still would of won the war. A year later, 1946 was slated to produce another 25 fully functional aircraft carriers. Also, by the end of 1945 our new aircraft were hugely superior to the Japanese Zeros. They didn’t stand a chance. By the end of 1946, the U.S. could of parked 50 or more carriers off the coast of Japan and bombed them to submission with conventional bombs. Our politicians knew this at the time. Truman and others knew our production capacity of military weapons would dwarf the Japanese by 1945. Knowing what we know now, how many of our soldiers died in the Pacific that didn’t need to? All because the public demanded action. All because our politicians didn’t have the will power to tell their own constituency that immediate action was not in their best interest. And it certainly wasn’t in the interest of our soldiers.
Bush forced our military into the Iraq war before we were ready for political reason alone. No armor. Not enough troops. etc. . . The sad part is we never really needed to fight a war in the middle east. The middle east will fix itself. In less than twenty years the oil will run out, and the Muslim nations will be alone with their sand. They won’t have to worry about unclean heathens trampling over their sacred ground. Such a waste.
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