The Illusion of Change

With the election of Brown to replace Ted Kennedy, a liberal such as myself needs to take stock of the current state of national politics. The once promising ascendancy of Barrack Obama has been reduced to but another melodrama. The dreams and aspirations of those of us who once were smitten with the hope of change must now endure but another example of American politics at its worse. The high ideas of service and placing the American people first were thrown out the proverbial window by a minority whose only interest was their own contributors. The super majority was little more than an illusion. Liberman, a loser of the first order and a turncoat to boot, was exercising the rule of one, and Nelson outdid him by sheer greed guiding his unprincipled compromise. Thus the super majority was only a number with no actual significance.
The democrats were all too comfortable with themselves. The president boldly walked into the same financial den of thieves with the same reckless and thieving scoundrels who had ramped up but another attack on the national treasury. Funny, the money interests need to be saved by all means while the suffering unemployed must wait in the welfare lines till the economy turns better. The lag in jobs is a function of the need for capitalists to amass even greater wealth before they are about to dole any out. And the difference between governing and campaigning is simple. In the later, all you need to do is talk you way out while the former takes some serious action.
The health care bill failed because it was left to the sausage makers to produce a product. It stunk from the outset by all of the special interests that needed their safety net. The politicians will cite the development of legislation is complicated. Why? Because lawyers love to use language that only they can understand. Lawyers, especially devious, unprincipled, or stupid ones, tend to confuse things so they can do what they want. They can commit crimes with impunity because they twist words to make their actions legal. They also prevent any action against them with the same slight of hand. Of course the really stupid and arrogant ones tend to get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Where was the president while congress was drafting legislation? Well of course, he and his crack team of spinners were out there spouting campaign rhetoric. He had time to prance about the world selling everything from his home town to accepting a Nobel Peace prize. Irony of all ironies given the state of our military adventures. When at home, he cavorted with known scoundrels like the drug companies chieftains. Meanwhile our dubious representatives were out collecting their graft from those who needed a special paragraph or two to protect their interests. In the end, the country was left waiting in the wings. When the product was delivered it was both incomprehensible and needed a reconciliation. Change like mist on a summer day vanished.
And the irony of all this madness is that this country continues to slide ever closer to the abyss of ruin. In a song by Jackson Browne, he makes the observation, they sell us our president like they sell us our soap. We shouldn't be surprised at how much our president is like the winner of American Idol as opposed to a leader. After all, he was elected on his wit and charm. We believed him because he was believable and more so because we needed to believe. We needed to have someone with high ideas. We needed a knight in shinning armor to rescue us from the dogs of war, from the robber barons of Wall Street. We needed to have hope again that we could will our way out of the morass of greed and war mongering. Yet, we still are plagued by that we had hope to rid ourselves. We are left, again, sitting on our couch looking at the spectacle of our political system exercising the only tool at our disposal the negative vote. Unfortunately, all that ever gets us is that which we already have – a hopeless journey along the road of political absurdity where the “new boss is the same as the old boss.”