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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FJB who wrote (319302)	8/12/2009 12:22:47 AM
From: Little Joe	7 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793955

My rant of the day: Here is my take on the rage at the town hall meetings. Something has happened to America, slowly, but inexorably. Every two years we hold national elections and the politicians spend hundreds of millions of dollars on negative campaigning. They basically accuse each other of lying, cheating and stealing. Is it any wonder that Americans beleive them. Why do they do this, because it works. Their pollsters and other handlers tell them what issues they should campaign on based on polls and focus groups. The president is apparantly changing the rationale for Healh Care Legislation from saving the economy because his pollsters told him "Insurance Reform" sounds better.(and the CBO didn't help) All of this handling is causing the politicians to lose their connection with the American people. They don't need to listen to us or care about our views, it is all about polls, and focus groups and talking points. So this has been building for years and many Americans realize that most politicians don't tell us what they think. They speak from talking points developed by some political operative. All one has to do is listen to the first democrat and the first republican to speak on any given day and you know what all of them will say, if you are lucky they may use different words just to make it interesting. Against this background this President is elected. His whole campaign is a message of change. We thought a lot of the change he stood for was honesty, transparancy, integrity, etc. We were tired of Congressional crooks and liars. We were tired of the culture of corruption. Wow. Were we fooled. We saw the President nominate every democrat tax cheat he could find to hold high office. Charlie Rangel who should be in jail, apparantly will not even be chastised. Chris Dodd and his republican co-signer get off completely without even a slap on the wrist. Instead of open government, it was ram bills costing Trillions through Congress in the middle of the night, without members having a chance to read the bills. It was more earmarks than ever. It was a President who puts out so many different versions of his position that in the end he can always point to one of the versions and say he was telling us the truth. Then comes the Health Care Bill with the President leading the way supporting as near as I can tell the House version of the bill, which we would have already, if he had his way. The argument was that we had to do this to save money and save the economy. The CBO shoots that one down and without skipping a beat or changing a word in the bill that he supported the rationale changes, after consultation with the political operatives, to Insurance Reform. And now they wonder why the American people don't believe them. They wonder why people go to town hall meetings and are enraged at hearing talking point mantras, instead of real answers. They can't understand the anger caused being told by congressman who haven't read the bill themselves that the protesters don't understand the issues. The hypocrisy of this is that the politicians have done everything possible to obscure the issues. Anyone who reads this bill and, I have, understands that they cannot tell how their health care will be affected by this bill. The plain fact of the matter is that there are so many boards, commissions, and agencies, new and existing, who will be enacting regulations affecting us, there is no way to tell how the bill will affect us. In the end we have to trust the Government to do the right thing. So I think the American people are asking themselves, "can I trust my government". They have observed how this administration and the previous one have conducted themselves and their answer appears to be no. lj