The Pox Is In Both Houses

To say that our government is becoming increasingly dysfunctional is so trite as to be hardly worth saying, but it’s time to ask what the hell are we going to do about it and when are we going to do it?

In the present “crisis” the government has failed so many times to pass a budget that it quit even trying to do so and resorted to passing “continuing resolutions” to operate the government financially. These resolutions had to be of shorter and shorter duration in order to pass, and now they cannot pass one as short as three fucking months.

The government has always lied to us, but until recently they at least tried to conceal the lies. Now they don’t even try to make the lies remotely believable, nor do they make any real attempt to conceal from us the fact that they are lying. The revelation that the Director of National Intelligence lies to Congress is met with a huge yawn. The director of the NSA admits that the reports of “dozens of terror plots” that the administration has been telling us about was vastly exaggerated, and no one cares. Obama says that “no one is listening to your phone calls” and just three days later a report comes out that proves him a bald faced liar; no one cares.

Congress has constituted itself to render the minority party utterly irrelevant, denying it the ability to participate in governance. When Democrats were in the minority they accepted irrelevance and whined about how the Republicans were not treating them fairly. Now that Republicans are in the minority they reject irrelevance in the only manner that is available to them. Democrats are happy to allow them to do so, complaining about “obstructionism,” and blaming everything on their opposition for their own political gain.

Americans have short memories. It’s only been seven years, but we threw out a Republican Congress and installed a Democratic one in order to end the war in Iraq and put a stop to the Bush imperial presidency. We got the “surge” in Iraq, immunity for the telecom industry with regard to spying on Americans and TARP. We elected Obama to change the way things are done in Washington, and we all know how that worked out.

Democrats are saying this mess is all the fault of Republicans, but no one’s skirts are clean in Washington today. The entire government is foul with corruption, greed, money and influence peddling. If the American people had either intelligence or courage we would throw them all out, but we will not.

They will promise lower taxes and we will reelect them.