Friday the 13th

There is a good chance that congress will vote on the so-called Stimulus Bill today. The bill will probably pass with no Republican support, other than a couple of RINO senators from the ultra-liberal coastal states. The reason for the complete lack of Republican support is that President Obama is not the uniter he promised to be. In fact, he is far more of a divider than the perpetually maligned George W. Bush ever was. Consider, if you will, the number of Democrats that voted to authorize the liberation of Iraq. That, folks, was bipartisanship, although the large majority of the democrats that voted in favor of it eventually changed their minds in light of political expediency. Or, if you will, became turncoats.

This "stimulus" bill is the polar opposite of a bipartisan effort. This bill was created solely by the rabid Democrats that for some unfathomable reason have been put in leadership positions for the Democratic party. I pity the millions of sane Democrats in our country; they must cringe at the idea of being part and parcel to the Reid/Pelosi leadership. Republican input on the development of the bill was not only unwelcome but forcefully and insultingly rebuffed. As such, the resulting bill is chock full of useless spending and even worse, government growth programs that will plague us for decades and quite possibly for the remainder of the still young 21st century.

One might wonder what became of that "smart young man" who was going to unite our lawmakers, who was going to go through each spending bill line by line looking for wasteful spending, who was going to usher in a new era of politics in Washington DC, and who was going to get a handle on the prolific spending and disastrous deficits of the Republican party. Where is he? Well, he never really existed. That fictional man was nothing more than a combination of media malfeasance and empty, disingenuous words. Oh, and an equally empty resume too.

We now have a president that skated into office based on a meaningless vote against an unpopular war and a grab bag of false promises. We now have a president that only answered one question honestly during the entire campaign. That question? Joe the Plumber's. Obama answered that question honestly: he is a socialist redistributionist. The answer to that question nearly derailed Obama's campaign, but the media (with help from Ohio governmental agencies) rode to the rescue. Their amassed forces were enough to discredit the questioner in the minds of gullible voters, successfully changing the debate from Obama's honest answer to Joe's "dishonest" question.

None of this matters now, of course. The bill is written, the congress will pass it, and the president will sign it. And despite the long-term damage that will result, not a single one of them will pay a political price for it. Why? Because we have spent the last few decades completely absolving more than half of the country from having any responsibility whatsoever to pay the bills incurred by federal spending. In fact, a very large number of them not only pay nothing at all, but receive government handouts. Those people could not care less about government debt; that's someone else's problem.

The someone else they are referring to is the collection of working class people euphemistically referred to as "the rich." Or, more accurately, "the evil rich." See, the only way to salve what little conscience these consumers have over the confiscation of earned wealth from the people that pay the vast majority of the taxes in this country is to demonize the wealth producers. Who are the purported villains behind this massive financial problem? No, not the Barney Franks and the Chris Dodds with their liberal policies that forced banks to make dangerous loans, not the dozens of legislators that accepted gobs of influence money from mortgage companies and pseudo-governmental agencies like Freddie and Fanny, and not the gullible and/or greedy people that took loans that they had to know that they could not afford to pay back. No, the accused villains are those evil CEOs. Now don't get me wrong, greed on the part of the executive management of banks and mortgage agencies surely played a part in this mess. Certainly there are complicit executives in those companies. But how does that fact seem to completely absolve Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and the rest of our corrupt government? How is that allowed to happen?

It's allowed to happen because the general public has been taught that private business men and corporations are evil, greedy, and bring no value whatsoever to our society. CEO salaries are presented by the Democrats and their friends in the media as unjustified, egregiously high, and nearly criminal and ripe for governmental regulation. I find it interesting, though, that people making every bit as much money in the sports and entertainment industries don't fall into the same class. We demonize the CEOs of the companies that bring us heat, light, food, medicine, and all of the necessities of life, while we idolize the celebrities that bring us, well..., nothing.

We're told that no CEO is worth that much money. We're told that they must have cheated or committed crimes against society to achieve their wealth. But ask yourself this: how much money did Oprah make last year? Or better yet, how much money has Alex Rodriguez made from his steroid-fueled success in playing what at the end of the day is a meaningless game? Where is the demonization of Oprah??

We are headed down a very dangerous path, a path that has been walked before to catastrophic result. We are walking headlong into a Socialist society led by a charismatic, power-hungry leader. We are allowing the productive members of our society to be classed as the cause of all of our problems. History shows us what comes next, but a large portion of us is willfully blind to the danger, or simply doesn't care for so long as the government will toss them $13 a week out of a trillion dollar spending package.