Mephisto, the beauty of this country is that excesses have a way of correcting themselves (e.g. the backlash against the absurd Congressional impeachment witchhunt of Clinton, the disgrace of McCarthy and Nixon, Reagan losing his teflon luster over Iran/Contra, the boot given to Dan Rostenkowski, Gingrich resigning, Gary Condit losing public support and hopefully his election, Phil Gramm resigning as his wife comes under scrutiny for her Enron role, etc.). The problem is that the masses usually lag in awareness and evaluation of the events and take some time to wake up, so it takes awhile. Events like the Enron/Bush scandal at least open their eyes -- more to come on that one, you can be assured.
Daschle has the repoobs in a complete lather, so you know he's doing a great job. The main concern is keeping the Senate from falling back in the hands of the nutcases like Lott until 2004, when we'll have a new president (unless shrubbo is impeached first, heh heh. But then we might have to suffer Cheney, hmm, a hobson's choice if I ever saw one). Bush has got to do what he's got to do on the terrorism front, and with the exception of the civil liberties abuses (led by Herr Ashcroft, and drawing the ire of even very conservative libertarian types), I'm behind him on that - how can you not be ? I prefer not to have planes crashing into our nuclear plants in the future.
Luckily, if there's a silver lining, it's that this terrorism war is diverting shrub's attention from doing more damage on the domestic side. Watch this as the Enron scandal unfolds and shows how wrong it is to have them writing Tricky Dick Cheney's energy policy in the secret bunker, and Wall Street trying to convert the Social Security program into a commission money making machine and dumping all the risk onto the little guy. We already have that in the form of 401k's, which are fine -- up the contribution limits there, and make them more portable, but keep Social Security as the fixed baseline retirement program -- seek slightly higher yielding but safe fixed instruments for that if necessary. And keep your eye on medical care and costs -- that will be a hot one for 2002.
As for India/Pakistan - let's just hope cooler heads prevail. |
