Two Major Parties Becoming a Joke to the People, Country a Laughing Stock for the World
In politics, issues are the most important thing, but appearances aren’t unimportant. On this front, the two major parties are screwing things up so badly that they’re becoming the laughing stock of the American people, and while we used to a nation that had earned respect around the world, now we’re a laughing stock. A post by Charlie Cook on over at The Atlantic went into some of this, a personal narrative of disappointment in just his circle of personal friends and acquaintances that I would be willing to bet mirrors most peoples’.
Here’s a taste:
Several days ago, I was stopped repeatedly, including once by a security guard in my office building and three times by different people at the grocery store. All were seeking some explanation as to what was happening with the debt-ceiling debate and hoping that I might be able to provide some assurance that things were going to work out OK. In some of these encounters, I tried to come up with a hopeful response; other times, I just threw up my hands.
That same day, one of my brothers-in-law e-mailed me a long and involved joke about a man who was born with a silver screw in his stomach instead of a belly button. As he grew up, he furtively searched for a way to have the screw removed; finally, at a monastery in Nepal, he found a monk who could make it happen. To make a long story short, a giant screwdriver appears out of a purple mist, removes the screw, and disappears out the window. Jubilant, the man jumps up, and his rear end falls off. The moral of the story is, “Don’t screw around with things you don’t understand–you can lose your butt.” Appended to the joke was the notation that Congress is screwing around with things it doesn’t understand, such as the economy, and that’s why we are all losing our butts. Lawmakers may not realize they are becoming national jokes, but they are.
He follows up with polling numbers that show how fewer and fewer people are respecting even our charismatic, compromising President, among other indicators showing discontent. He wonders out loud about whether those numbers, and the fallout that will likely come from our federal credit rating downgrade, will lead to the jokers in Washington to decide to stop posturing and make the kind of deal we need them to make for the long term fiscal health of the country.
I doubt it, and I think this last part from Crook’s piece is spot on in describing one of the reasons why:
My guess is that most members of Congress and their aides are too close to the process and don’t fully appreciate what they are doing to themselves, the institution, and the nation’s political process.
Read the rest at The Atlantic »
About Solomon Kleinsmith
I started this site in the summer of 2010, really just as a hobby at first. But I'm pretty ambitious, and between being able to recruit some great bloggers to join the team here, putting a ton of work into the site and attracting a lot of traffic through Twitter, we've grown very fast for a young blog with next to no budget.
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Puh-lease. I’ve been hearing about how the USA is either a laughing stock or hated around the world for almost all of my 31 years.
By the way, your link to the Atlantic is broken: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/07/no-one-in-congress-is-safe-after-the-debt-fight/242739/
I located the article on my own and it is authored by Charlie Cook, not Clive Crook.
Oy… thanks for the fact checking :) Fixed.
Besides the debt & credit downgrade, now we have a Mississippi lynching + a presidential candidate making a dramatic show of mixing state and evangelical religion with his big Texan prayer day.
I spent a lot of time in Western Europe in the 1990s (non-military, more integrated with locals in France, Germany, etc.). Often I found myself defending the US against unwarranted US-bashing. The kind of US-bashing that’s been going on since Vietnam, though, is different from what’s happening the past ten years with both parties decadently spending our way toward bankruptcy and with one of our two main parties exceptionally religiously-ideologically driven and driving.