It could have been such a good debate...but Noooooohooo!

It could have been a great debate, but noooo ohoo!

There was precious little that was presidential about the debate at Norwood University, er I mean Longwood University Tuesday night.  In fact, if one of the contestant’s would have shut up a bit, we might even have been able to hear something over the clatter.  In the infamous language of John Belushi, “You could have given us such a great debate, but Noooooooooo ohooo!”

Actually Belushi is a pretty good choice of character. Tim Kaine came off looking a lot like Bluto right even down to the “Take No Prisoners” attack lines.  And to be honest Mike Pence didn’t look much better, nodding his head and then getting drowned out by tiny Tim’s cut-ins.

I was so shocked at how the whole thing went down, I was half expecting Pence to get up and utter Otter’s speech from Animal House: 

But you can't hold a whole party responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole political system? And if the whole political system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our government institutions in general? I put it to you, Barak - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!

The world is full of winners and losers and sometimes you can be one or the other. It’s even happened to me, although we might not want to go into that right now.  But what we have been seeing from the two parties this year reeks more of juvenile behavior than it does the philosophical sentiment we would really like to hear.

Instead of just slamming each other, why not have a solid discourse about the real issues.  At this point in the game, who did what to whom and when is of little consequence.  What really matters is who is the best of the two candidates to lead the country back to something reminiscent of the past.  Certainly, it’s hard to make the case that “It’s 3 a.m. and all is well.”

The actions over the past few months lead me to believe that the homo simpletons of the world are still alive, well, and functioning in the American government.  They live, they breathe, and they die in so called political parties.  And it isn’t one party or the other.  You think I am wrong? Let’s take a second to see what that great editorialist HL Mencken had to say about democracy back in the Roaring ‘20’s:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

                                                                        H. L. Mencken

Mencken had a lot more to say about democracy; here are 10 more of his political platitudes:

  1.      If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.  

  2.      Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

  3.      The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

  4.      Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

  5.      A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

  6.      Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

  7.      I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

  8.      Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

  9.      I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

  10.  A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Hard to believe how little has changed since Mencken was writing for the Baltimore Sun back in the days of the 29^th President Warren G. Harding.

The World Anti-Doing Agency

Somewhere deep in the hearts of Monty Python they must surely have a skit that looks like this comment from a USA Today story about the latest, that is Sept 13, Guccifer DNC Hack release.

Really, just the fact that this is still going on is sort of hilarious.  For the life of me, I cannot understand why these political entities don’t have their servers and computer stuff locked down.  The cost of not doing so is being written about all over the media.

But in this latest story by William Cummings there is a striking typographical error, or at least I think it’s a typo, that identifies a “the World Anti-Doing Agency."  I suspect that the typist merely slipped when writing the Anti-Doping Agency, but sometimes typos are a slip of the lip, so to speak.  It certainly makes sense when talking about these political bodies, i.e. the RNC and the DNC as anti-doing. Look at the past 30-years of the American political process and it’s not hard to make the jump to anti-doing.

There should be a huge list of bullet points for the Anti-Doing Agency, starting with immigration and ending who knows where.

Immigration-We as a country need to come to grips with this problem.  Back in the old Ellis Island days, people who were “undocumented” were nicknamed WOPs (without papers).  It is the main thing behind the term applied to Italian immigration at the time.  The name continues to stick, although the original sense of the term is lost and the pejorative term remains. Personally, I am not so sure we can deport 11 million people, but I am pretty sure that the American public has had enough of those criminal elements that keep coming into our country creating havoc.

Affordable Care Act-it’s interesting that this behemoth appears to be dying under its own weight.  What is to become of President Obama’s signature effort?  It pretty much looks like it won’t stand the way it was designed.  Personally, I think some kind of national health care plan is in order, but to create national health care and not include the insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals in wringing out a way to do it that makes sense doesn’t make any sense at all.  We can’t expect to dictate how those plans will work without considering the effects it has on those institutions.  In creating this, they need to talk to the subject matter experts who are involved in every facet of healthcare.

Conflicts of Interest-Most people would like to think that our politicians are capable of taking the moral and ethical high ground.  It would be very nice to think that’s possible. But the reality is that power corrupts.  Is anyone really surprised that the high level politicians figure out ways to bilk the American public?  Just take a quick look at what’s happening now.  Even at the local level, we have City Council people who tout that they have a potential conflict of interest and yet are allowed to vote simply because they say they can do so without being biased.  To me, that’s a lie.  There is no way that those people would vote against something that benefits their spouses.  Just imagine what it might be like to do so and then go home?  Yeah, right, I’m going to vote against a raise action that would benefit my wife and therefore me, too.  As the saying went, “Sorry Charlie” but I can’t believe that any politician would do something like that.

Ben Franklin, 230 years ago, told a crowd outside Constitutional Hall in Philadelphia who wanted to know what kind of a government the US would have, said: “A republic, if you can keep it.”  The history of democracies, and republics for that matter, is that they are very difficult to maintain.  Such is the way of these United States.  And when you take into account where our political system rests in this day, it is looking more and more likely that the second part of Franklin’s comment is beginning to look prophetic.