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Thursday, February 26. 2009
Let It Grow
You gotta love President Obama! During his speech before Congress, the unofficial State of the Union speech taking the place of the State of the Union the former president didn’t give, he deftly laid the blame for the current state of affairs on that former president, and by extension, that president’s party, the current minority in Congress.“Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that for too long, we have not always met these responsibilities — as a government or as a people. I say this not to lay blame or look backwards, but because it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.”
And then the president went on to excoriate the Bush Administration and Republican policies that pretty much put our economy in the shithole it now occupies.
At times the president laid out the trouble, the peril, we are currently facing and then, like the two Roosevelts before him, returned to his campaign theme of hope. A big part of that hope was his intention to invest in the future, building a new power infrastructure, rebuilding roads and bridges; keeping school teachers, firefighters and police officers on the job, instead of being laid off because cities and states haven’t the funds to pay them.
President Obama’s plan is pretty expansive, maybe a lot bigger than the $700-plus billion dollar stimulus passed by Congress and signed by the president last week. The past eight years of maintaining a status quo when it comes to energy and national infrastructure, of making the wealthy wealthier and widening the gap between the wealthy and everyone else, has come at a price, not just collapsed bridges and the worst attack on our homeland in history, but in leadership of the world.
When President Bush alienated us from the rest of the world, we became walled in from the realities of our age, that petroleum would be the millstone around our necks, that we would be beholden to the very people who helped finance the September 11, 2001 attacks and the rest of the world would advance the technologies that could free us from our dependence on non-renewable energy sources.
Germany and Japan have taken our solar technology and created thriving industries. South Korea builds the batteries for the electric cars that will be built by American companies and China is now tooling its infrastructure to be energy efficient.
Like we found out 50-plus years ago when the Soviet Union sent Sputnik into space, we are behind the technology curve and this time the effects have bigger consequences. Besides leading the U.S. in green technology, China owns a lot of our debt and they build many of the goods we buy in our stores.
My Trusty Trek was assembled in China.
So, the president’s vision is to turn that around, be the leader in technologies that will define the 21st Century and to slash the current deficit. Yeah, despite the massive outlays of our treasure in the trillions of dollars, when one includes the costs of two wars and the two major stimulus bills, President Obama wants to once again relieve us of that immense national debt.
The president in fact told us it was patriotic to not only invest in the 21st Century, but it was also patriotic to finish high school and go on to higher education as well as enlist in the military.But the Republicans are against all that, if you believe what their spokesperson, Governor Bobby Jindal said in his response. The response started with Mr. Rogers, err … Governor Jindal … skipping out into a hallway with that goofy, Alfred E. Newman look on his face, that sort of smirky smile. He then delivered his speech in sing-songy fashion, as if he were reading a bedtime story to children.
He told stories about his immigrant parents and his dad walking him down the grocery store aisles, telling him “Americans can do anything!”
All the while proposing the same old, tired Republican song about how tax cuts and less government are the answers, despite tax cuts and less government being major reasons for the current economic crisis. Let the banks fail, let General Motors and Chrysler go out of business, let the unemployment rate creep over 10% and go to 25%, like it was in 1933 when Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as president.
That’s how we get out of the current economic malaise — let it grow. Republicans, for whatever reason, don’t believe in government — unless they’re in control of it, then they like it a lot! Especially if you can creep around the Constitution violating civil liberties and giving no-bid contracts to your favorite corporate buddies, helping the rich get richer; in fact, I just heard for the first time in maybe a year or more, a Republican say we shouldn’t tax the rich because they are the ones who create the wealth that trickles down to the rest of us. You gotta be effin’ kidding me.
And then Bobby Jindal lied. He had this cute story from Hurricane Katrina, when Sheriff Harry Lee complained that people in Jefferson Parish couldn’t use their own boats to rescue fellow citizens trapped by the floodwaters in NOLA (New Orleans for those who aren’t atwitter) due to federal government regulations: “During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.
There is a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and enterprising spirit of our citizens.”
But the scene between Governor Jindal and Sheriff Lee never happened. Sheriff Lee did have troubles with federal bureaucracy trying enlist volunteers to help in the rescue, he event talked about it on Larry King Live, but then Congressman Bobby Jindal was nowhere near NOLA at the time, he was still in Baton Rouge where his family had evacuated to before Katrina hit.Why Lie? Especially on TV in front of millions of viewers? Sheriff Lee is no longer among the living so maybe Governor Jindal didn’t think it could be verified, or exposed.
Then there was the governor bashing things like billions for high-speed rail, the one line he pointed out going from “Las Vegas to Disneyland.” Well, that’s a lie as well; it would go to Los Angeles about 80 miles north of Anaheim where Disneyland is located so my take on it is that Jindal was trying to make a cute joke: L.A. is like Disneyland, a phony fantasy — get it? No, Los Angeles is pretty fucking real governor.
Not to mention, the freeways from Los Angeles to Las Vegas are some of the busiest in the nation and high-speed rail would certainly relieve much of the traffic congestion, while providing a green alternative for travel and create thousands of permanent jobs for the people needed to operate the system!Of course Governor Jindal didn’t point out the high-speed rail that will go into the district represented by Ohio Congressman John Boehner because of this bill.
And the governor blasted a volcano monitoring system that would be funded by the stimulus package— less than two weeks after the National Geological Survey said Mount Redoubt in Alaska would erupt “within hours or days.”
You do know, Governor, volcano monitoring saves lives. But then, you’re the Republican who brought up Hurricane Katrina as a testament to bad federal government that was in the complete control of Republicans at the time of that disaster!
If Governor Jindal is the best the Republicans can muster … well, George W. Bush was elected to a second term so I’m hedging my bets. The Democrats can lose anything.
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