Kausfiles.com posted a little rant yesterday about Obama needing cajones when it comes to getting his administration properly staffed. In a nutshell, they claim the President is obsessed with avoiding having to deal with any kind of negative press (as demonstrated by the continued adolescent whining about Rush Limbaugh, Jim Cramer, et al).
‘Tis true, of course, and it plays out on a daily basis with the continued fawning of the mainstream media over some perceived “novelty” of the new administration (a rare, notable, and interesting exception that the love affair is fading can be seen here). However, I believe the administration’s inability to find someone “worthy” of appointment begs a far greater question: Is there no one involved in politics who has real morals and ethics and obeys the law? The resumes of potential appointees like Daschle, who failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes, should be tossed into the circular file; Geithner should never have been allowed oversight of every penny provided by taxpayers after his own failure to pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes and his role in the meltdown on Wall Street. Even the President cannot lay claim to honesty what with the now conveniently-forgotten questions about his campaign contributions, and his wife’s $195,000 raise at the University of Chicago Hospital when he became a Senator (and promptly obtained a million-dollar earmark for a pavillion there; interestingly her job and that of the other “executives” were eliminated due to “budget concerns”, shortly after she had tendered her early January resignation).
But I digress. Corruption in the DNA of political critters seems to be mandatory criteria for membership in the club. And while it may, indeed, be hypocritical for the President to conveniently insist on hiring responsible and ethical people, that he cannot succeed in doing so after 2 months in office should be a big wake up call for everyone who reads about these never-ending vetting failures and the sound of silence echoing throughout the corridors of the Treasury Department.
For far too long we have paid our elected representatives (perhaps too) well and in some strange way have elevated them to a sort of pedestal, believing that by doing so they magically obtain a level of vision and intelligence not accessible to the common man. Being inherently creatures of convenience and very narrow focus we have chosen to forget that they serve to represent us, their job is to represent our basic and collective interests, which are really little more than keeping our country – and therefore us – safe from harm. They don’t know – they cannot know – what is best for us, each individual. My wants from this journey we call life is probably far different than those of you who are reading this blog. Yet the government’s primary role is simply to allow us to pursue those wants, through the inalienable freedom that basically means doing so pretty much as we wish, s0 long as we don’t harm one another in the process. We send those critters to Congress to make sure that is the case.
And we’ve ended up here. For all the world like little deer in the headlights as the “best and brightest” have managed to collapse the world as we’ve known it with their oh-so-clever “models” that, in fact, bear little to no semblance to reality. We have laws and rules and regulations up the yin-yang, and see hands out to get something for nothing everywhere we look. We have millions of sheep-like followers and so few real leaders (no, Barack Obama is no leader; he is simply a good orater and that doesn’t count, particularly when nothing of any sense or valid purpose is found in the words). I’ve heard it said that honest people want nothing to do with government, and the more I watch what goes on there, I can’t say as I can find much fault with such an assumption.
We really need to start all over again. Toss every critter out of Washington and toss probably most every one of them out of the state legislatures, too; trim down government spending to the truest, most basic needs and then allow those who know how to lead to lead. Everyone else follows or or at least gets out of the way. The Tea Parties springing up all over the country are, in my opinion, a very good sign. It means that people are starting to pay attention and starting to at least become angry over the selfishness that pervades our government – but I believe, however, that we must also see this as a mirror of the overall collective American mindset. As individuals we must also return to the basics, each one reclaiming morals and ethics and choosing to deliberately perform to the best of their abilities. All the while with the understanding that doing so is no guarantee of equal material reward, only that we are guaranteed the opportunity to pursue it while demonstrating fairness in our dealings with one another – from family to neighbors to coworkers to employees to shareholders.
This is what I call cajones from the ground up. Not the ground-up cajones that we let run things today.