A Pledge to an Ideal Rather Than to the People

Perhaps I’m nitpicking, but I can’t help but notice that the Republicans made a pledge to an ideal rather than to the American people.

The Pledge to America is not titled A Pledge to the American People; a pledge to someone; a pledge they’d need to honour. Rather it’s a pledge to an ideal; something that doesn’t really exist; a pledge that need not make sense nor be honoured.

The Pledge to America is a pledge to their ideal of an idyllic America that never existed. They’ve pledged to take the country back to the time when the government didn’t interfere with business and businessmen treated their employees with fairness and dignity and sold quality products at fair prices.

Of course, they’re really dreaming of the 1800s when children were employed at starvation wages to clean mortar shells because their hands were small enough; a time when there were no safety regulations and a laid-off or crippled worker was on his own.

Pledging to an ideal rather than to the people allows the party to make meaningless promises because the promises aren’t made to any identifiable people.

*** Notice that I ignored the Republican’s fanciful math here … like … where budget cuts of $100 billion will wipe out a deficit of $1,400 billion dollars. oops.

We Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Vote

Polls show that the economy is the number one issue to Americans; that Americans, by a ten percent margin, blame Republicans for the state of the economy; that people approve of Democrats over Republicans by a nine percent margin; and that, by a ten percent margin, Americans plan to vote for Republicans over Democrats this fall. (CNN Opinion Research poll, Sep 1-2, 2010) (NBC - Wall Street Journal poll, Aug 5-9, 2010). (Gallop poll, Aug 23-29, 2010).

WHAT ???!!??!?!?

People are upset with the Republicans, but they’re going to turn the government over to them? Are we out of our collective minds? Is the United States actually the insane asylum for the planet?

We’re mad at the President and the Democrats for not getting enough done to turn the economy around, but we also seem to understand that the Government is currently run by the minority party in the Senate. Republicans are on pace to triple the greatest number of filibusters by a Democratic minority. (ABC News, Mar 1, 2010). Filibusters have stalled critical appointments, only to be followed an almost unanimous vote in favor of each appointment. The Republican Party is using a tactic of stalling and stopping to make the Democrats look ineffectual. Are we really dumb enough to fall for this?

We Americans realize that, in December 2008, we were headed for the second great depression; a calamity which will take years to fix. Yet, here we are, in a mere recession, beginning the long haul out of the collapse.

Do we want to reward those who held off economic Armageddon? No. We want to put those who crashed the system back in power, with the same policies that caused the crash.

To borrow from the president: This is like taking a kid who crashed the car because he was texting and giving him the keys to the repaired vehicle and a new cell phone.