Wednesday, March 04, 2009
I Don't Know
About the only thing I do know is that our country and most of the world right now is in a mess. I have a house that won't sell at about half of what I paid for it. The value of my 401k looks like the price list of Macdonalds value meal menu and after insurance it costs me $150 to see an eye doctor for 20 minutes that results in a prescription for a $200 bottle of eye drops, that costs me $40.
What I don't know is why the above is going on or who to blame. The government of the last eight years blames the government of the previous eight years and of course the current government blames the previous government. Some people blame the rich for making too much money and others blame the poor for spending too much money. Some people put the blame on not buying American, while many others have made Walmart and its low-priced foreign crap one of the few business success stories in the USofA. Others blame the foreign governments for selling us cheap and shoddy merchandise while forgetting other Americans have accepted the cheap and shoddy merchandise to sell in their stores. Like I said, I don't know who to believe or to blame.
We spent over ten years in Vietnam with less than stellar results and have been in Iraq for all the wrong reasons overseeing seven years of disaster after disaster. The Soviet Union (much to our glee) spent over ten years in Afghanistan with nothing but dead bodies to show, and we're about to send another 17,000 American bodies over there to do the same. We're hoping for peace in a Middle East that has never know it, and I don't expect it ever will while more than one person is still alive to argue.
I also don't know why we put so much store in what celebrities say. That's not to say that many, if not most, are pretty smart folks. It's just that why do we care more about what some svelte actress or singer with designer shades has to say about foreign policy that some scholar who's spent his entire life studying the policy. Which brings me to the below comment I read on BBC after also reading about how the supposed leader of the Republican party has publicly kow-towed to a radio celebrity:
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, writing on his website newmajority.com, bemoaned the prominence conservatives were giving to the radio host.
"With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence - exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we're cooperating!"
Labels: government
