I Know The Answer

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I know why this is true:

President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress registered record-low approval ratings in a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday, and a new monthly index measuring the mood of Americans dipped slightly on deepening worries about the economy.

Only 29 percent of Americans gave Bush a positive grade for his job performance, below his worst Zogby poll mark of 30 percent in March. A paltry 11 percent rated Congress positively, beating the previous low of 14 percent in July.

But why? Most everyone can tell you, on both sides of the aisle, why they believe the approval ratings for President Bush are down. But why is it, pray tell, that ratings for the U.S. Congress are at their lowest since the Mesozoic Era?

Very simple: those disenchanted with the GOP believe the GOP has cast aside its very Conservative foundation. I would tend to agree. Which is why I write no more checks to the RNC.

Those who vote Demorat think the Dems aren’t nearly sufficiently Left, and believe the Dems have sold out because America is still in Iraq.

The problem with President Bush and the GOP is that they are disorganized, tired, old, have no central focus and are content to be blown around by the prevailing political P.C. prairie winds. Sure, we hear some Republicans giving occasional lip service to many of the core Conservative ideas I hold dear: a smaller federal government, decisions pushed down more to the local level, budget cuts, controlled borders, tax cuts, a resolute, decisive, well -funded, well-led military determined to protect this nation and her interests, et al. But in my opinion we’ve seen way too much moderation on the part of the GOP for the bulk of the last eight years.
We held the power, ladies and gentlemen, and failed to use it. We failed to communciate, we failed to hold to our platform, to our past, to our ideals, and we let the federal budget expand shockingly. We seemed to be embarrassed to embrace our core values in the face of persons who possessed nothing more than louder voices — certainly not common sense, logic or proportion.

And we seem to have completely forgotten history. So sad.

I would provide two Barry Goldwater quotes for your perusal at this point:

I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.

I believe him. And:

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

As far as I am concerned, the defense of liberty includes the survival of my nation, securing it against threats from within and without! From within in terms of illegal immigration and the porosity of our borders, as well as the growing Islamification of my country (Dearbornistan in Michiganistan, to start). And from without in terms of all those countries who exist simply to see the mighty fall. That issue is a post in and of itself.

So, Congress experiencing the lowest ratings ever? To me, no surprise. Sadly, with some exceptions, more and more, both sides of the aisle are becoming one and the same.

BZ

P.S.
Sorry, couldn’t pass this one up at the last moment. From Traction Control:

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23 thoughts on “I Know The Answer”

  1. I couldn’t have said it better myself BZ…

    Both party’s are nothing short of an embaressment to this country.

    Is there any wonder we can’t stop the bleeding? This country is an open sore, our enemies know it, and the flood of illegals know it.

    The cats out of the bag now, no more excuses. More than before we’ve been able to see congress for what is…

    What liberals are and what the republican party has become, what we need in a president and don’t need anymore.

    There’s a ton of asshats that have to go. But this country is so stupid that we’ll be blogging and posting about some of these crooks, moonbats, liars and fakes for years to come. How stupid can we be??

  4. This is the outcome of a long, long chain of things that do not start at Bush, Carter, Kennedy, FDR, Hoover…

    Jerry Pournelle wrote about his upbringing in rural TN, and the one room school house and how no one thought much of anything of that sleepy little town on the Potomac, Washington, DC. Government was distant, small and didn’t do a thing to regulate education, health care, social security or much of anything. He writes of a world that was local, where politics was not only local but not National, and when something needed to get done, you looked around you and got it done, and did not wait for a bureaucrat to OK it from Washington… your local bureaucrat had to answer to YOU.

    Strangely enough the US did not have a ‘Federal Reserve’ banking system! Yes, Jefferson wanted one, but when it came time to re-up it, Andrew Jackson nixed it as handing too much power to foreign interests in the affairs of the US. Further I looked at that and the view of industrial social justice as seen by none other than Teddy Roosevelt! Yes, he speaks of it, but not as *we* have limited our debate to in these current years. Here is a paragraph from President Jackson on why he did not want to re-up the National Bank:

    “Nor is our Government to be maintained or our Union preserved by invasions of the rights and powers of the several States. In thus attempting to make our General Government strong we make it weak. Its true strength consists in leaving individuals and States as much as possible to themselves in making itself felt, not in its power, but in its beneficence; not in its control, but in its protection; not in binding the States more closely to the center, but leaving each to move unobstructed in its proper orbit.”

    I not only think that, I believe in that outlook: binding ourselves together as friends and neighbors FIRST without the need for overhead from the federal government. Theodore Roosevelt would continue this and move it into the industrialized era and address trade unions and their necessity, but his points also go to the trade unions themselves when they get large enough to act like the companies they wish to address:

    “A democracy can be such in fact only if there is some rough approximation in similarity in stature among the men composing it. One of us can deal in our private lives with the grocer or the butcher or the carpenter or the chicken raiser, or if we are the grocer or carpenter or butcher or farmer, we can deal with our customers, because we are all of about the same size. Therefore a simple and poor society can exist as a democracy on a basis of sheer individualism. But a rich and complex industrial society cannot so exist; for some individuals, and especially those artificial individuals called corporations, become so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them, and cannot deal with them on terms of equality. It therefore becomes necessary for these ordinary individuals to combine in their turn, first in order to act in their collective capacity through that biggest of all combinations called the Government, and second, to act, also in their own self-defense, through private combinations, such as farmers’ associations and trade unions.”

    We dare not restrict the right of individuals to collect together for their own safety and to call those in power to account, be they in government or industry. That said in our modern era, when Unions act as badly as the companies they attack, Americans also have the right to leave such and find justice elsewhere. Government has A role to play, not THE role.

    Those are the unenumerated rights we all have via the main body of the US Constitution and Amendments IX and X. There is responsibility that goes with such rights, however, and that is *also* written down in the most often cited and least understood passage in American history:

    “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

    Who is speaking these words?

    We the People.

    We are going to do things but here is what we are doing and responsible for. Not government, which is our creation, but each of us as individuals and a society and a Nation. When government fails to do these things, while it may be some responsibility of individuals in government,the failure is ultimately ours as a People. We create government to do some of the things necessary in this statement, but when it fails, as governments can and do fail us, it is We the People who have the ultimate responsibility over ALL of our governments.

    Point one finger at Washington and three point back at you: Federal, State and Local. YOU hold the bag for all three. And it is your thumb that shows your final destination in the ground, when all that will be left of you are the things you crafted to hand on to the next generation. Notice that no deity is mentioned to take responsibility for your actions? You are responsible.

    There is no inevitable end to our actions, no assurance that liberty and freedom will win out. Indeed the moment you stop caring about liberty and freedom, they become eroded, diminished and soon you will have none. The moment you say ‘Not in my name’, you repudiate what it means to be a citizen and the equality between citizens to say that yours is the ONLY way to go. If you don’t like the activities of your Nation it is your job, as We described it in that Preamble, to come and talk with your fellow citizens about it and find a better way forward to ‘make a more perfect Union’. That is your JOB as a citizen and your responsibility. You cannot coerce your views upon others, nor belittle or demean theirs without also belittling and demeaning yourself in the low esteem you hold your fellow citizens and harm our general welfare by diminishing the People instead of uplifting them. Scream in rage to enrage others, and you break our Tranquility of society. And step out on opposing the enemies of freedom that attack us, and you do not provide for our common defense but, instead, step from the People and make holding justice AFTER WAR nearly impossible.

    I have severe problems with the Right and Left in America as NONE espouse these things that make America both great and humble. When we step from humility we also step from greatness… they go hand in hand as we have much to be humble for and never do achieve greatness in perfection. We do not end that striving, however, although we now have those across the spectrum wishing us to do other things and to stop that striving now… and forever.

    With none supporting these positions, I support only those few that have some clue about them. I have looked at the candidates for President and, no, your favorite stands no better in that measurement than the others. They all lack in ways that seek to end the striving of America, impose government from the top downwards, enforce a stark view of ideology upon the Nation… and none propose to let this Nation speak in its diversity any longer nor to hold that to be a Nation is sacred for us as citizens. And that, as our founders pointed out, will lose us freedom and liberty and nation.

  5. GG: when you “go moderate” you please few and accomplish little. At this rate, I would rather the Congress and Senate fold up and make no further laws, forever.

    AJ: all good words, but we are too fractionalized and split to come together absent a Leader Of Mythic Proportions. The Demorats and their sniveling toadies and minions have done such an effective job in placing sharp wedges between so many different strata of society — well, I believe it WOULD require a LOMP to even remotely restart congruity in the country.

    BZ

  7. Mr. Z – The times are no longer creating the man to lead.

    Therefore it is stuck on us: We the People. So did we declare and so do we to this day, or we have no Nation at all.

    I am afraid it is the no Nation route today.

    “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

  11. Jenn: yeah, I saw that. And living in Fornicalia, you and I BOTH know that school administrators statewide are swooning at the prospect of taxpayer-paid junkets to Mexico to sample said curriculum in order to begin their OWN “ground-breaking” program locally.

    BZ

  21. A good, sad commentary on ’07 US politics.

    I am one who likes Bush but laments his spinmeisters are not doing their job. Though I am all for not speaking ill of your predecessors, of your critics, and those who follow you (cough, cough–Clinton/Carter!), I think he is way to humble and classy to speak ill of other politicians or disgrace the office. He’s trying.
    My biggest gripe is immigration. Homeland security?he’s my boy.

  23. Chip: thanks for taking the time, visiting and commenting, and welcome aboard! Please come back and visit. And immigration? A massive irritant with me also. There are many, many things that President Bush could do to more ably ensure border security, but he CHOOSES not to do so. Not because it isn’t within his purvey but because, for two very, VERY misguided reasons, he thinks he must not. He is simply WRONG.

    Neo: thanks for the comment and, naturally, I’ll have to go look.

    BZ

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