Unwillingness to Criticize

On the face of the two political parties are highly critical of each other. Democrats rant at great length about Republican obstruction, and Republicans call Democrats “socialists,” but it’s all window dressing. There’s a lot of name calling and charges over trivia, but never any real, serious accusations of wrong doing or inability at governance.

Even the current nonsensical impeachment talk is about “border security” issues and not over several real issues that could be used such as declaring war in Libya, changing the “health care reform” law in several substantive ways, civil liberty issues or his policy of assassination.

Every president has administrative issues, but Obama has set records. The Obamacare website was budgeted for $56 million, cost $209 million and still was not functional when it rolled out. Fixing it was supposed to cost $91 million, more than the original cost, but wound up costing more than $175 million. In 2012, $7 billion of the $10.5 billion spent in Afghanistan was wasted. Massive problems at the VA have been being covered up, and now $17 billion is needed merely to put a patch on the problem.

Republicans should be making a major issue about this, campaigning on it in fact, but they are not because they know that when they regain power they will do precisely the same thing.

The problem is not that “big government doesn’t work,” but that neither party is able to make it work because they are not interested in governance. They are interested only in maintaining their own party’s hold on power. The time that Obama spent on fundraising trips could have been more profitably spent making sure than the VA, DOD and Health Department were being properly supervised, but he was too concerned about being sure that his party had enough money to buy the upcoming elections to properly supervise the Executive Branch.

That’s not to criticize Obama, because he did not spend any more time on fundraising trips than did George Bush before him, and Bill Clinton before him. The president’s primary function is to serve as the head of his political party, and only secondarily is he the chief executive of the nation which elected him to office.

The idea that a nation with 3.8 million square miles and 317 million people needs a “small government” is absurd, and big government not only does work, it is absolutely necessary. It needs to be staffed, however, by people who care about governance and not about partisan power.