San Diego — I am so sick and tired of the inane. petty, moronic, offal passing for political discourse I could scream. Good grief people there is more at stake than the petty BS filling the sound-bites, talking points, and most of all simplistic, cartoonish Facebook posts increasingly corrupting cyber space as the election nears.
Is it really more important that one or the other will provide free birth control than what they will do to correct the suicidal course of our economy?
Is it really more important that they care one way or the other about same sex marriage than it is about how they will respond to global terror actions?
Is it really more important whether they will, in their heart, find solace in a belief in Allah or God or Yahweh or pure science, than what they will do to uphold their oath to defend and protect the Constitution?
Is it more important that they or their parents were born in Mexico, Kenya, Hawaii, or on the moon than whether they will work to make this country strong and secure?
It saddens me and sickens me to discover that apparently those inconsequential things that, in the cosmic scheme of things, will not make us one iota more secure and will not strengthen our economy or make us less of a debtor nation, are more important than the things that will do those things.
If we crash and burn economically because the dollar loses its status as reserve currency or our credit rating is so diminished by our profligate borrowing that interest rates on our debt skyrocket or, worst of all, our debtor nations have had enough and refuse to loan us another dime, it will not matter if we hand out contraceptives for free.
If we let the jihadist world see us as weak and incapable of (or unwilling to) protect our own people abroad, much less our own diplomats, it will make little difference if we allow or disallow same sex marriage.
And if we allow our national interest and standard of living based now on fossil fuels to be in thrall to countries that hate us and wish to see harm done to us, then it will make little difference if we are only “investing” in technologies still 10 to 30 years away from practical deployment and refuse to exploit our own resources in the meantime no matter how many Delta Smelts or Spotted Owls we save (unless we are saving them as a future food source which they may need to be when we can no longer afford to raise much less transport our foods because fuel costs have stopped the tractors and the tractor-trailers along with our cars.
And if we loose our basic freedoms, if we allow executive orders to openly countermand laws passed by Congress and transparently do violence to constitutional protections, then the change we will get will leave us without very much hope.
Here in California we are leading the charge to demonstrate just how uninformed we can purposefully become in order to maintain the free flow of government goodies given to those who will not produce, and taken from those who will. Of very special interest to me is Proposition 30. I find myself in the bizarre position of wanting it to pass even though I do not believe for one heartbeat it will do for education what the unions or the liberal academicians say or think it will. I read the bill, something apparently those supporting it did not. It allows the same escape clause for the state legislature to commandeer the moneys that the California lottery, also passed to support education, contained. Education sees not a penny from that educational lottery anymore; and I think even if it actually does get what the Proposition promises — that is 11 percent for education broadly defined and, of a personal interested, only 4 percent of that 11 percent for Community Colleges — that won’t even cover the deferments we endured for the past 4-5 years. So why am I wanting it to pass?
Because academe is so sure it will solve all their ills and put us back on track, its passage will at least buy us some time to plan for the chaos to come when they realize the money isn’t coming as the ads and the unions promised. If it does not pass, however, there will be an almost instant bloodbath of course cutting and with it the jobs of lots of adjunct professors and, in our case, a gutting of our program. The governor even promised as much. Whatever logic might be found in the concept that revenues are paid mostly by wage earners and in an age when unskilled labor is a dying need, wage earners need an education ergo education ought to be the last thing cut, is lost on politicians and the voters who keep voting them to return and keep it up.
What a joke this has all become. And the biggest practical joke on our citizens is that our national choice of leaders is between someone who would like to see the country follow the lead of California or someone who would at least, perhaps (though not certainly) attempt to slow down that slide into ruin but not likely do what is needed to actually fix it.
I think the founders of the country, and, in fact, the founders of this state, would be disgusted by where it is come. And truly saddened by the lack of people on the political horizon that seem to have an interest in saving it and have a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting elected to do it. The only workable solutions would levy so much pain all around it is political suicide to propose it. The parasitical class has become so large and so powerful politically the nation and the state have a far better chance of sliding into an implosion than of actually working to climb out of the holes we have allowed them to dig. In another four years Greece may, by comparison, look like a model of fiscal responsibility.
And we are worried about who can marry whom or whether or not the government’s job is to try to make sure there are no consequences to sex. If that turns out to be the position of the majority of voters in this country and this state then perhaps we deserve to implode.
N. DAVID KING's BLOG 