I got to thinking about this today...
I had (have) gone out with a woman and she was shocked that I am a Republican.
There are certain preconceived notions about what party alignment means when it comes to your makeup as a person and living in and around New York, being a Republican often carries a social stigma because avowed “liberals” who are self-described as open and progressive are all too ready to jump the gun and make determinations about you as a person.
In any event over the course of time there were many instances where a certain amount of amazement was expressed on the part of this particular lady regarding my views.
And truthfully, nothing is quite as simple in this world as people would have you believe, nothing is quite as black and white as people would like to make it.
But I did come to a realization today about the differences between the two political parties...
The Democrats for better or worse are about inclusion and the Republicans are about divisiveness. There is no better example of that than the behavior of Congress over the last two years and also the formation of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. Does the Tea Party really talk about doing anything good? They talk about big government and being against it but one of the biggest problems the Republican Party has had over the last decade is that they have fully embraced big government in many ways.
I never was a fan of President Bush (Junior). I didn’t vote for him and repeatedly the discussions I had with fellow Republicans were about the President’s free-spending ways. The funny thing is that in those discussions almost to a person, people were ready to acknowledge that Bush Jr. did not follow the true tenets of the Republican Party in terms of being fiscally responsible.
Furthermore, the idea that regulation is a bad thing is really a bit of a non-starter.
There is a lot of lip service given to the fact that ‘Government’ needs to get out of ‘Business’s’ way but the interesting thing that no one seems to remember in the course of these discussions is that whenever that happens the end result is a huge bailout foisted upon the taxpayers of the nation because regulators were asleep at the switch and allowed people to go off and rob others blind.
No... we really don’t talk about that much now, do we?
Our nation is becoming a place where it’s really hard to stand unless you are all the way to the left or all the way to the right.
But I am increasingly tired of listening to what I call Bullshit Rhetoric, rhetoric that fails to acknowledge how our country arrived at this point in its history, the responsibility the previous administration played in bringing us to this point and basically people running around with their fingers in their ears yelling ‘Nyah, nyah, nyah, I can’t hear you’ at the top of their lungs.
So, as I sit here and write this on Memorial Day, a national holiday where we sit on the precipice of another Presidential Election campaign cycle, I have to wonder what will be paraded before us over the next five months.
I’d like to think that we’ll actually be able to engage in intelligent discourse but the truth of the matter is we’ve never been able to do it before and I highly doubt we’ll be able to do it now.
So... in that context, when asked if you are better off today than you were four years ago, ask yourself this about the eight years that preceded it...
I had (have) gone out with a woman and she was shocked that I am a Republican.
There are certain preconceived notions about what party alignment means when it comes to your makeup as a person and living in and around New York, being a Republican often carries a social stigma because avowed “liberals” who are self-described as open and progressive are all too ready to jump the gun and make determinations about you as a person.
In any event over the course of time there were many instances where a certain amount of amazement was expressed on the part of this particular lady regarding my views.
And truthfully, nothing is quite as simple in this world as people would have you believe, nothing is quite as black and white as people would like to make it.
But I did come to a realization today about the differences between the two political parties...
The Democrats for better or worse are about inclusion and the Republicans are about divisiveness. There is no better example of that than the behavior of Congress over the last two years and also the formation of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. Does the Tea Party really talk about doing anything good? They talk about big government and being against it but one of the biggest problems the Republican Party has had over the last decade is that they have fully embraced big government in many ways.
I never was a fan of President Bush (Junior). I didn’t vote for him and repeatedly the discussions I had with fellow Republicans were about the President’s free-spending ways. The funny thing is that in those discussions almost to a person, people were ready to acknowledge that Bush Jr. did not follow the true tenets of the Republican Party in terms of being fiscally responsible.
Furthermore, the idea that regulation is a bad thing is really a bit of a non-starter.
There is a lot of lip service given to the fact that ‘Government’ needs to get out of ‘Business’s’ way but the interesting thing that no one seems to remember in the course of these discussions is that whenever that happens the end result is a huge bailout foisted upon the taxpayers of the nation because regulators were asleep at the switch and allowed people to go off and rob others blind.
No... we really don’t talk about that much now, do we?
Our nation is becoming a place where it’s really hard to stand unless you are all the way to the left or all the way to the right.
But I am increasingly tired of listening to what I call Bullshit Rhetoric, rhetoric that fails to acknowledge how our country arrived at this point in its history, the responsibility the previous administration played in bringing us to this point and basically people running around with their fingers in their ears yelling ‘Nyah, nyah, nyah, I can’t hear you’ at the top of their lungs.
So, as I sit here and write this on Memorial Day, a national holiday where we sit on the precipice of another Presidential Election campaign cycle, I have to wonder what will be paraded before us over the next five months.
I’d like to think that we’ll actually be able to engage in intelligent discourse but the truth of the matter is we’ve never been able to do it before and I highly doubt we’ll be able to do it now.
So... in that context, when asked if you are better off today than you were four years ago, ask yourself this about the eight years that preceded it...
- Who was asleep when the real estate bubble burst and bad mortgages were packaged together to hide the fact that they were horrible investments?
- At the end of the day, why did we really go into Iraq?
- If we were all about making the world safer for us by attacking the stronghold of terrorism, can we today look at Afghanistan and say anything we have done has made a huge difference? Have we fared any better than the Soviets did in the eighties? Are our relations with Pakistan any better and do we have a clearer understanding of the dynamic and the culture of the tribal areas that straddle the borders between those two countries (places that historically have given rise to the extremism we have vowed to fight)?
- Where did that surplus go that was there at the end of the Clinton years and what happened to the idea of the balanced budget amendment?
- If the system is broken, who broke it?
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