Wonderful Wonderful

There is one thing that liberals and conservatives have in common. They both love wonderful or great or any other superlative that you would like to throw into the mix. The difference is what they wish to describe with these superlatives. Liberals like feelings and intentions. They want world peace and universal health care. They hate poverty and crime. They know in their hearts that every criminal can be lead away from that life of crime and that every despot can be shown the error of their ways. Just keep trying to explain that error of their ways and they will eventually get it and go through a Paulian conversion and become good citizens. Paul was converted on the road to Damascus, perhaps there is hope for Assad.

I remember back in the Clinton era, (the good old days) every social program was "for the children". It seems like once a week, that was announced as the reason for a big new spending bill. It was kind of funny in a pathetic way. If you can't justify a program with logic tug at the heart strings. The problem is all of the good feelings and good intentions do not get the job done. Expensive and expansive programs don't necessarily get it done either. It usually takes time, good planning, and hard work to accomplish good works. Lots of money accompanied by incompetence never gets the difficult tasks done. Those were the days when, if an American ship was attacked, all you had to do was launch a Tomahawk missile and blow up an aspirin factory. Job done. Nothing more to see here.

It seems that there are no simple problems anymore. But in spite of that conservatives care more about results. Results are harder to come by and more complicated to achieve. You can't just form an agency, hire an out of work political hack to run it, give it a ton of funding and expect results. Take a long look at the TSA or Homeland Security. I feel that that is the reason George W. Bush  had so many problems. He had too many old political retreads reliving their glory years. Certainly, the last three years haven't shown much of an improvement in the results department. We have more people not working than there were three years ago. There are fewer new business start ups. Housing is a wreck. We seem to be starting into an inflationary spiral without growth. This is not good.

We are in a hole and we have a government that continues to dig. If we keep doubling down on failure it cannot breed success. There are people out there with experience and good ideas but the leaders are deaf to all but their own voices while they all mill around slapping each other on the back and admiring what a great job they have done. Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel really is a freight train heading your way.