Andrew Malcolm's perfectly worded contempt for Congress and press

© 2018 Peter Free

 

23 January 2018

 

 

House and Senate — incorrigible 'assholes' all?

 

Veteran correspondent Andrew Malcolm said this — about the American Congress and our most recent government shutdown:

 

 

How did our federal governing officials on both sides slip so easily from doing what they were actually hired to do, namely govern? And instead spend so much time strategizing, maneuvering and posturing to avoid getting blamed for what they didn’t do when they should have?

 

These elected bumpkins are each getting paid a princely price of $174,000 (plus free gym, swell insurance, cheap food, etc.). That’s for about 133 workdays a year. That makes for a paycheck three-plus times larger than the average American’s annual pay for 240 workdays. Three times the money for about half the workdays. How does that work?

 

Part of the problem is the absence . . . of political moderates to design and broker compromises. This leaves the stage to performance art by the most extreme wings of each party to profess positions they claim prohibit dealing.

 

With the hallowed freedom of the press also comes an often-neglected responsibility of the press. That means, at least occasionally, disdaining what’s easiest to do or what fits personal prefabricated politics in favor of genuinely seeking what really matters, what’s important to cover.

 

Like — oh, say — holding both party’s members of Congress accountable for dodging their fiscal duties so grossly, so routinely and so consequence-free?

 

© 2018 Andrew Malcolm, The real shutdown outrage: Inept Congress picks posturing over governing, McClatchy (23 January 2018) (excerpts)

 

 

Think about it

 

How many economically 'advanced' nations do you know that routinely have national government shutdowns because their elites are too inept to keep them running?

 

Any ideas how ridiculously much it costs to stop and restart the American federal wheels process?

 

How would you describe the totality of anxiety and difficulties that these brain dead interruptions cause the millions of folk that they affect?

 

Any simile for the lunacy of drama queen starting and stopping government on a week by week basis?

 

 

The moral? — if I were king of the world . . .

 

Virtually everyone in American power would be yanked into the National Reeducation Gulag for ethics and competence training. Even though I am relatively certain that most of them are too morally base and self-satisfied to benefit.

 

In consequence of those too generously displayed personal flaws, most of the Gulag-contained would stay there the rest of their lives. We could think of them as a pedagogic display for eagerly intelligent children.

 

Such a Consequences Plan might work to properly motivate the usually attention-craving stooges attracted to the exercise of government power. Hence, the experimental appeal of structurally enforced (authoritarian government) competence like China's.

 

In truth, the United States long ago dropped Freedom's be-like-us ball.

 

Today, we're just a bunch of obviously barbarian yahoos, who cannot even govern ourselves, trying to know-it-all push other people around.

 

One despairs.