HOUSE REPUBLICANS: You guys got elected because 50%+1 of the people in your district who bothered to show up and vote believe it’s better to let elderly people die and poor people starve to death than it is to pay more taxes and/or cut out other spending in the federal budget.
Please take a stand. it’s time you let everyone know, including the House and Senate Democrats and the President, that in your vision for a Conservative/Tea Party America the elderly and disabled are no longer entitled to / do not deserve their government sponsored health care and/or income benefits. It’s time they got back to work or got busy dying and stopped being a burden to society and wasting the tax money of people who make over $300,000 per year. The federal budget should more closely follow the laissez-faire economics of the 1880s coupled with the defense spending of the 1950s (15% of GDP instead of that dove-ish 6.5% of 2010). Coincidentally, Federal social policy should also closely mirror that of the 1950s as well.
DEMOCRATS INCLUDING PRESIDENT OBAMA: You guys got elected because 50%+1 of the people in your district who bothered to vote suddenly woke up in the middle of 2006 and realized that eight years of Republican control of congress had left us with a deregulated financial system primed for crisis, a federal budget neck deep in a trillion-dollar illegal war in Iraq, and social policies that made the Gilded Age seem progressive.
Please take a stand. It’s time you let everyone know—including the Republicans, grumpy Tea Partiers, and Fox News viewers—that your vision of America is an America where we’ve actually learned the lessons from the past 200 years; that war is not always the only solution; that we have a responsibility to each other and our children; that what’s good for working people is good for business; that a strong economy needs more than just an invisible hand to guide it; and that it is, in fact, the year 2011 and most of the world has actually accepted the Liberal idea that we are all in this together. Dwight Eisenhower has been out of office for fifty years and Ronald Reagan for twenty-two.
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I think this way we can agree to call this whole thing a stalemate and declare that there is no longer any room for compromise in American politics. Let’s dig up Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush and have them duke it out. Let’s have Bill Clinton spar with Newt Gingrich all over again. Is Henry Kissinger still alive? Someone wake him up and have him play a cribbage match with Madeline Albright. (I mean the last time the Germans started a fight with the Czechs it was the Americans who came out on top.) Even Richard Fucking Nixon was forced to give up the Gold Standard and needed to institute price controls and wage freezes when the going got tough. In a democracy leaders must remember that they were elected to govern not just squabble and hold a party line.
Great leaders must have the strength, at times, to resolve a crisis and govern not by doing what their constituents think is best, but by doing what their wisdom-and the wisdom of their forebears-suggests is best for America. A great leader knows that popular opinion and the whims of an electorate are merely the fashions in which history is dressed. The foundation—the bedrock—of good government and the democratic process is cemented with the stones of wisdom, insight, and experience learned from the history of a nation.
