Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Congratulations Democrats! Now don't screw it up
It felt like the first pleasant news in years as I woke up this morning to hear that the House of Representatives will be controlled by the Democrats come January. Pleasant, of course, until I remembered that the Democrats are politicians too, and they're just as likely to pull all the stupid politician tricks that make me aspire to some day live in a mythical land where there are no politics.
So I have this message for you, Democrats: you'd better follow through on all this idle chatter about building concensus working on bipartisan solutions. And don't go thinking this gives you any ground from which to pitch weird lefty non-issues like gay marriage.
We have important things to worry about in this country, and gay marriage, stem cell research and a thousand other "hot issues" are not among them. What we need are healthcare coverage for everyone, wildly reformed education (how about paying teachers commensurate with their impact on society?), wildly reformed foreign policy (like, let's stop being the World Police, how about?), civil rights reform and re-establishment and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of environmental protection (Kyoto protocol ring any bells?). Sorry for the parenthetical rants, but it's not clear to me that when I say anything obvious, a politician will actually understand my meaning.
And if I hear anyone going around spouting off that old saw that "if we weren't in Iraq, we could be spending all that money on other things!" I'm going to start smacking people. "All that money" only exists because it's paying for the war. No one's going to spend that level of cash on anything else, because they don't want to. So quit it with the weird financial logic. There are many, many fine reasons to stop spending $100,000 every second, or whatever ridiculous level it's currently at:
What are not good reasons to stop spending all that cash in Iraq, I hear you say? "So we can spend it on other things" is the ripest one I've heard, but I'm sure there are others. That money, all those billions of dollars we're spending, is going to cost us many times over, and I'm sure we'll still be paying it off 100 years from now. I don't have any math backing that up, but unless something drastic happens, that extra trillion dollars (or two or three, however much it ends up being by the time we can actually get ourselves extricated) will still be costing us interest for the lifetime of any child born today.
Finally, what I said before, about keeping your "bipartisan" promises? Yeah, not kidding about that. If you want to see another term, if you want to see any support at all, you'd best work with everyone. Compromise is hard. I'm not going to be 100% pleased with your solutions. If I'm 100% pleased, it means you did something wrong, because somewhere, there's my opposite, who's going to be 100% displeased. Overall, I should only be happy about 50% of the time, or you're doing it wrong. Always keep that in mind: compromise means you'll probably end up only partially pleased with the agreement.
At least now, I'm a little bit less worried about an uncontested W'08 campaign.
Posted at 09:30 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater