"Daddy! Daddy! My shoe's untied...!"

[image: toptenz.net]

Geez, people. 

 Lighten up and take some damn responsibility...please?!

I often muse about presidential politics in the pre-Facebook era, a time where most morons were institutionalized instead of given a public forum of their own making.  Yeah, that statement is inclusive in case you're wondering about my own motives here.  Sure, in the good old days, muckraking was confined to angry letters to some junior editor that didn't give a shit, street corner polemics for the benefit of homeless drunks and hookers killing time between customers, union meetings, lawn signs and cute little bumper stickers that proclaimed, "I Like Ike" or "LBJ For The USA!"

Today, everybody is a political writer and the audience is anybody dumb enough to hit the 'Like' button once too often.  Blogs abound, (Gee, I have two of them!), and every single word is circulated as 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' to an endless collection of suckers who happen to have the mental acuity of an over-stuffed recycling bin.  As the cliche goes, 'if the myth is more appetizing than the truth, print the myth.'  Mark Twain journalism at its best, except that Twain's publisher was careful to sell it as fiction.  Seems they had better lawyers in those days.

Lately, the constitutionalists, the conspiracy theorists (the new 'bored housewives' of America, only without the gender distinction), the trench-huggers on the barren outskirts of the political left and right, the Bible-thumpers -- those moral wagon masters of the wasteland, the talking heads of the blogosphere and pimp television, who soil the fragile airwaves with the hate and vitriolic bile of divisiveness to perpetuate a moral agenda that they are more than willing to casually toss aside like a moth-eaten sock --  for the money, for the ratings, for the notoriety they wear like a filthy rag of self-anointed nobility.  And when caught in the trap of contradiction, they toss the lie around the room like children playing catch with a rabid bat.  And guess what?  The 'they' is 'us.' 

I posted a picture of President Obama mostly because he is our current President.  In case most of you have forgotten, we, as in us -- elected him.  Gee, how quickly we forget.  If you listen to a lot of folks, you'd swear he snuck in a basement window and barricaded himself in the master bedroom for the sole purpose of becoming America's first black, Kenyan, Hawaiian, Muslim, undocumented alien, socialist, fascist...did I miss anything?  Oh, gay figurehead of the 'home of the brave and the land of free.'  We might want to re-write that stanza to reflect the current tone:  'home of the whiner and land of the unaccountable.'  Maybe we can sing it in French.  Might be more palatable for our chorus of hypocrites.  I mean, if all we want to do is elect a dartboard to represent our own failings as a constituency, why not hang a pinata in the oval office and for once, take ownership of our self-delusional ways. 

Oh.  The loudest complaint this week?  Abuse of the office of President.  Too authoritarian, too free-wheeling with the law, the Constitution...probably show up on TV tomorrow in fatigues, packing a pistol and smoking a cigar.  Like old busy-whiskers marching into downtown Havana some five decades ago.  Anyone ever ask themselves why every US President since Ronald Reagan and perhaps even earlier, has pushed presidential authority to or beyond its constitutional limitations? 

 

[Hope you are thinking here and not merely loading your pistol!]

Ah. Yes, that's right.  President's don't make laws, Congress does.  And if Congress has devolved into a pack of partisan thumb-suckers and scapegoaters, who in the hell is going to keep the country operating?  Who is going to make some damn decisions?  The Supreme Court?  No!  Then who?  Oh, maybe the President!  Okay, we're making progress here.  Now, Congress has always been a little persnickety.  Kind of goes with the territory and in the case of the United States, we never quite embraced the 'United' part of the title.  Oh sure, when somebody pisses on our hubcap we get all uppity and stand on 1 1/2 hind legs, but then the honeymoon loses its thrill and each state goes back to a sort of, well...try to picture a group of ostriches masturbating.  Yeah, that's why their heads are stuck in the ground. Not pleasant to watch.  This trend has been rolling downhill for decades and each subsequent President has been forced to tickle the boundaries of impeachment because he was elected to do a damn job, regardless of any affection the Congress might reluctantly grant him (or her as the case may ultimately be).  The President has been entrusted by the voters to follow the agenda that he was elected by and on -- i.e., do the job!  You laugh?  Me too.  It is a somewhat naive assumption in a political system that seems to dysfunctionally thrive on flux.  But, it is our system, of our making and until somebody cares to shred the Constitution and start over, we're stuck with it and all its inherent flaws.  Yeah, flaw is the right word.  The Constitution is vague, archaic and a document about the many compromises necessary to form a republic in a dangerous world.  Not good or bad, just what could be signed at the time. A little like the Bible, which historian Will Durant noted, "Great read, but if you had to live by it, you'd go nuts."  We are now, in the evolution of our political spectrum, at the 'nuts' point.      

So I got a great idea.  Why doesn't everybody shut the hell up for one hour a week and focus on tangible and practical solutions, instead of this endless wart hunt we engage in because we are too damn lazy to do the homework necessary to maintain a healthy and progressive republic. Sadly, we no longer even deserve democracy because we have become very poor custodians of our cherished ideals and principles.  Those kind of intangibles demand a rigorous kind of maintenance, a ruthless degree of personal honesty and a level of self-awareness and integrity that is not only all encompassing, but all inclusive.  And as I have tried to point out here, perhaps clumsily in some ways, check the recrimination at the door.  Your door and my door.  We are this republic.