Where Are All Of The Wise Men?

If you were like me several years ago you were always wondering how things would go if, for a period of time, the country was controlled by a conservative president and majority conservative congress and, at another time, a liberal president with a majority liberal congress.. We would actually get to test the tenets of conservativism and liberalism against each other and see which actually delivered positive results. Since I first had that thought we have since got our wish on that and I have to say I'm bewildered at how little gets done when either side has clear advantage over the other. In the case of Bush in 2000 he was basically starting with a clear slate. We had just finished eight years of relative peace and prosperity and Clinton had just delivered the first balanced budget with surplus in over twenty years. Bush was given the key to that "lock box" full of cash and America was hopeful that great things would get done. The problem with the Bush administration is that it was given permission by the voting public (I think) to fix what was basically not broke. Bush and his cohorts went through that money like frat boys through their daddys' trust fund and eight years later it was a matter of history that it was "an epic fail" . To be fair about this, Obama and his democratic comrades did not start with a clear slate from the previous administration as did Bush. In fact the closer it came to the end of his watch the clearer it became that greed,corruption and personal enrichment was their true face. Where did those pallets of money finally wind up? It was as if the intention of the Bush administration was to deliberately empty the government's checking account all along and leave the new administration with nothing in which to accomplish it's agenda. It dramatically re-established the distribution of wealth back to banks ,private corporations and America's wealthiest , and left the average Americans and their government with the bill and no means to pay it. I find it particularly interesting that politicians cry out for national patriotism from the masses while being lead around by their noses by American corporations who have long ago "gone global." But back to the issue at hand. Given their advantage at present the Democratic liberal agenda is strangely absent. For a year now the conservative minority has called the shots against a liberal majority,,,but how? I suppose it's the curse of liberalism to view all issues as complex things needing endless discussion and pruning to get them just right before committing to anything. It's unsettling for someone like me to admit it, but our Democratic representatives at present seem only concerned about their own personal survival in the political arena at the forsaking of the large groundbreaking and risky issues that they have championed (at least publicly) for so long. What a bunch of impotent public servants they are. Hypocritical and self serving. But all you conservatives out there shouldn't start cheering just yet. Conservative representatives excel at filibustering liberal issues but what have they actually delivered to the American public save the tax breaks for the wealthiest of the wealthy? To quote a liberal blogger, "Americans who "self-identify as conservative" rather than liberal are for the most part, low-information Americans." They claim membership in a club that doesn't really serve them.

Ask yourself this question, "what has any politician at the national level done for you except vote us into war and bankrupt the nation? Anybody? This is my question at this point, "where are all of the wise men that we elected to office?" All we really ever get is sly men...savvy officials who play the system but produce no results. In our current desperation we may mistakenly assign wisdom to people who run for office simply because they are nationally recognizable but who in reality have no clue or compulsion to drastically change the status quo. In the early formation of a political career certain ideas are engrained on the mind of the aspiring "public servant." For starters,they all read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead" and "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. One preaches that some human beings are more important than others, and the other is effectively used as an example of a political war manual applying ancient winning war strategies to winning political strategies. Oh well I guess they have to read something. But somewhere along the way they have lost their capacity to truly serve and we as a nation have lost our ability to discern between a saviour and a conman. Do you know the difference?