“We've affirmed that the ability to live a healthy life in this great country is a right, not a privilege.”
With those words, Sen. Harry Reid celebrated the passage of a landmark health care reform bill by the US Senate just before Christmas. Depending on how you feel about big government and its ability to actually “fix” something as big and complex as the health care industry, that statement either gives you a good warm feeling down deep inside or it sends chills down your spine.
I’m in the chilled-spine camp, myself. Based on its track record with the soon-to-be-bankrupt Social Security program, the sooner-to-be-bankrupt Medicare program, and the “reforms” it mandated for the mortgage industry that contributed to the great financial meltdown of the last few years, I think there is reason to doubt that increased government involvement in the health care industry is going to be a good thing for us in the long run.
And if something isn’t done soon, it may be too late to stop this runaway train. But what can we do? After hearing about how some on-the-fence senators (I’m looking at you, Ben Nelson) were basically bribed into voting for this bill, I’m about ready to consider all-out revolution.
But I’m afraid that idea is a non-starter. I seriously doubt that there are many Americans who care enough about what their government is doing to take to the streets and toss rocks at well-armed federal troops like the protesters in Iran are doing.
Perhaps we need to concentrate on a more subtle way to throw a roadblock in front of the left wing juggernaut that currently holds the fate of our nation in its grip. Sometimes it is wise to consult the history books in such a situation and see what the past can teach us.
Let’s go back to 1992, when liberals were cheering the election of a young Democratic governor from Arkansas and his frighteningly serious wife to the highest office in the land. High on the list of priorities for the new president was – you guessed it – health care reform. President Clinton put the first lady to work on a radical plan to remake the health care system into something that the government could control and manipulate until everyone had the same (bad) level of care, regardless of how much they were able to pay.
Maybe the plan would have succeeded, eventually, but President Clinton had a real knack for doing stupid things that put him in a bad light and weakened his credibility. As a result, he was able to accomplish very little in his eight years in office. Thank goodness!
And I don’t think it is a coincidence that the nation enjoyed a good deal of peace and prosperity during that time of near-inactivity by the federal government. I don’t think it is unreasonable to suggest that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Monica Lewinsky for the good times we enjoyed in the 1990s.
So far, President Obama has steered clear of the kind of personal failings that hobbled Bill Clinton’s liberal aspirations. And I think that is what needs to change. The government is working to well for our own good. What we really need is a Monica Lewinsky for the new millennium.
Somewhere deep in a super-secret location (probably Dick Cheney’s basement) where high -ranking conservatives hatch “if all else fails” type of plans for saving the country from liberals, they need to consider recruiting some young, attractive, conservative females to apply for jobs at the White House and get close to the president. And I mean really, really close.
It is a lot to ask of any young woman, but once the scandal breaks the country will be safe from the specter of an active government until 2012, at least. And then we can all relax as President Palin breezes her way to an easy victory and…okay, maybe I need to think about this a little bit more.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Is it okay to throw stones at Tiger?
I’m sure that by now you’re probably sick of listening to people talk about Tiger Woods and his harem of Barbie-doll mistresses. Well, that’s too bad, because I’ve got something to say on the subject and this is my column, so you’ll just have to suffer a little bit longer.
It seems that whenever a celebrity gets caught with his pants down, everyone wants to be the first to pronounce judgment and cast a few stones in his direction. I guess it makes us feel good to see the rich and powerful fall on their faces, especially when they do things that we, personally, would never ever do.
Considering the demographic that my writing appeals to, I am confident that most of the men reading this column have never cheated on their wives or girlfriends. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that’s because my male readers tend to have high moral character or because they tend to be relatively undesirable to the opposite sex.
Either way, the men who are reading this probably feel okay about looking down on a philanderer like Tiger, safe from the perch of the moral high ground. But is that a fair, or wise, attitude, to have?
A study I recall reading about earlier this year might suggest that it is not. The study was designed to measure how our confidence (or overconfidence) about how well we are able to resist temptation relates to our ability to actually resist temptation when we are faced with it.
The results were interesting. People who had just finished eating a big meal, for instance, were likely to significantly overestimate their ability to turn down a chance to eat one of their favorite foods at a later time when they weren’t so full. On the other hand, people who were hungry at the time they predicted their capacity to turn down a tasty snack at a later time had a more realistic attitude about their own willpower.
How does the experiment apply to Tiger Woods and our judgmental attitudes towards his indiscretions? Well, it’s been said that you shouldn’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. So let’s try and put ourselves in Tiger’s golf spikes for a minute.
Tiger is one of the richest, most famous, and most powerful men in the world. I don’t consider myself to be an expert on women, but I have noticed that a lot of them don’t find money, fame, and power to be unattractive traits in a man. So Tiger probably has a lot more women lining up for a chance to spend some private time with him than most of us could imagine having to deal with.
Plus, Tiger travels. A lot. All over the world. I can’t remember the last time I even left Houston County by myself, and I certainly don’t spend time traveling solo to exotic locations all over the world the way Tiger does.
So here you have a rich, powerful man whose work calls for him to spend a lot of time away from home who undoubtedly has beautiful women aggressively seeking to start up a relationship with him under any circumstances that he finds convenient. How many men do you think would fall prey to the same type of shenanigans he apparently engaged in under similar circumstances?
I’m sure we’d all like to think we’d stay on the straight and narrow and come home to our supermodel wife and perfect children untainted by the touch of other women if we were Tiger. But can you know that, for sure, not having faced the same temptations that he has?
Science and common sense suggest that you shouldn’t assume that you’re a better man than Tiger unless you’ve walked his path. Most of us never will, of course. But maybe we should be a little less eager to cast stones at people whose sins are just a little more sensational and newsworthy than our own.
It seems that whenever a celebrity gets caught with his pants down, everyone wants to be the first to pronounce judgment and cast a few stones in his direction. I guess it makes us feel good to see the rich and powerful fall on their faces, especially when they do things that we, personally, would never ever do.
Considering the demographic that my writing appeals to, I am confident that most of the men reading this column have never cheated on their wives or girlfriends. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that’s because my male readers tend to have high moral character or because they tend to be relatively undesirable to the opposite sex.
Either way, the men who are reading this probably feel okay about looking down on a philanderer like Tiger, safe from the perch of the moral high ground. But is that a fair, or wise, attitude, to have?
A study I recall reading about earlier this year might suggest that it is not. The study was designed to measure how our confidence (or overconfidence) about how well we are able to resist temptation relates to our ability to actually resist temptation when we are faced with it.
The results were interesting. People who had just finished eating a big meal, for instance, were likely to significantly overestimate their ability to turn down a chance to eat one of their favorite foods at a later time when they weren’t so full. On the other hand, people who were hungry at the time they predicted their capacity to turn down a tasty snack at a later time had a more realistic attitude about their own willpower.
How does the experiment apply to Tiger Woods and our judgmental attitudes towards his indiscretions? Well, it’s been said that you shouldn’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. So let’s try and put ourselves in Tiger’s golf spikes for a minute.
Tiger is one of the richest, most famous, and most powerful men in the world. I don’t consider myself to be an expert on women, but I have noticed that a lot of them don’t find money, fame, and power to be unattractive traits in a man. So Tiger probably has a lot more women lining up for a chance to spend some private time with him than most of us could imagine having to deal with.
Plus, Tiger travels. A lot. All over the world. I can’t remember the last time I even left Houston County by myself, and I certainly don’t spend time traveling solo to exotic locations all over the world the way Tiger does.
So here you have a rich, powerful man whose work calls for him to spend a lot of time away from home who undoubtedly has beautiful women aggressively seeking to start up a relationship with him under any circumstances that he finds convenient. How many men do you think would fall prey to the same type of shenanigans he apparently engaged in under similar circumstances?
I’m sure we’d all like to think we’d stay on the straight and narrow and come home to our supermodel wife and perfect children untainted by the touch of other women if we were Tiger. But can you know that, for sure, not having faced the same temptations that he has?
Science and common sense suggest that you shouldn’t assume that you’re a better man than Tiger unless you’ve walked his path. Most of us never will, of course. But maybe we should be a little less eager to cast stones at people whose sins are just a little more sensational and newsworthy than our own.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Let the president decide
As I listened to the back and forth over President Obama’s plan to send more than 30,000 fresh troops to Afghanistan, I kept having the same thought over and over: thank goodness it wasn’t my job to decide what to do with this mess. I’m not defending or attacking the strategy the president has decided to follow, I’m just saying that I have no idea what to do in Afghanistan and I’m not that sure anyone really does.
Just try to picture yourself sitting in the president’s seat and having to make a call on how to proceed with this operation. You either ramp up the conflict as the military strategists suggest, thereby guaranteeing that many more Americans will lose their lives, or you pull up stakes and leave the country to the devices of the same nuts that blew up the World Trade Center back in 2001. Talk about a no-win situation.
Of course this is the kind of decision you sign up for when you run for president, right? Perhaps. But, on second thought, I seem to remember from way back in my American Government class that it is really supposed to be congress’ responsibility to declare war, not the president. So why does it seem to be completely up to the president to decide where we fight, and for how long?
That is, of course, a tricky question. It’s true that only congress can declare war, but it is also true that the executive branch has, over the years, acquired the authority to send a lot of soldiers off to fight on foreign shores for long periods of time without officially declaring a war. And congress has largely gone along with the idea.
Back in 1973, as we were still reeling from the effects of that little undeclared war in Vietnam, Congress tried to clarify and restrict the president’s power to commit our armed forces to a conflict by passing the War Powers Resolution. It limited the president’s authority to send troops into harm’s way for more than 60 days without a declaration of war or a (more nebulous) congressional authorization of the use of military force. It obviously left the president with a lot of leeway.
As you might be aware, congress never issued a declaration of war for the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan. They may seem like wars with all the shooting and blowing things up and people getting killed, but according to our government we are not formally at war. Congress did issue very broad “authorizations of the use of force” prior to the launching of those campaigns, but they left it up to the executive branch to work out all the unpleasant details.
For a person with my limited mental capacity, that seems an awful lot like they are following neither the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution’s specific delegation of the power to declare war to the legislative branch. Congress is supposed to decide when the military option is warranted and the president, as commander-in-chief, is supposed to decide how to best achieve our military goals once the fight is joined.
It doesn’t seem to me as if things are working that way right now. It is clearly the president’s show, and congress will rubber stamp whatever plan comes out of the White House. It’s just one of many examples of how the legislative branch seems to have ceded a power that the Constitution specifically enumerated to it over to an increasingly powerful executive branch.
Seeing as how they still control the purse strings, congress could easily take control of the matter at any time. But they won’t. Like me, they don’t want to have that decision weighing on their shoulders, nor do they wish to face the consequences should the decision not pan out. And as long as they can keep ignoring the Constitution, there’s no reason why should burden th
Just try to picture yourself sitting in the president’s seat and having to make a call on how to proceed with this operation. You either ramp up the conflict as the military strategists suggest, thereby guaranteeing that many more Americans will lose their lives, or you pull up stakes and leave the country to the devices of the same nuts that blew up the World Trade Center back in 2001. Talk about a no-win situation.
Of course this is the kind of decision you sign up for when you run for president, right? Perhaps. But, on second thought, I seem to remember from way back in my American Government class that it is really supposed to be congress’ responsibility to declare war, not the president. So why does it seem to be completely up to the president to decide where we fight, and for how long?
That is, of course, a tricky question. It’s true that only congress can declare war, but it is also true that the executive branch has, over the years, acquired the authority to send a lot of soldiers off to fight on foreign shores for long periods of time without officially declaring a war. And congress has largely gone along with the idea.
Back in 1973, as we were still reeling from the effects of that little undeclared war in Vietnam, Congress tried to clarify and restrict the president’s power to commit our armed forces to a conflict by passing the War Powers Resolution. It limited the president’s authority to send troops into harm’s way for more than 60 days without a declaration of war or a (more nebulous) congressional authorization of the use of military force. It obviously left the president with a lot of leeway.
As you might be aware, congress never issued a declaration of war for the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan. They may seem like wars with all the shooting and blowing things up and people getting killed, but according to our government we are not formally at war. Congress did issue very broad “authorizations of the use of force” prior to the launching of those campaigns, but they left it up to the executive branch to work out all the unpleasant details.
For a person with my limited mental capacity, that seems an awful lot like they are following neither the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution’s specific delegation of the power to declare war to the legislative branch. Congress is supposed to decide when the military option is warranted and the president, as commander-in-chief, is supposed to decide how to best achieve our military goals once the fight is joined.
It doesn’t seem to me as if things are working that way right now. It is clearly the president’s show, and congress will rubber stamp whatever plan comes out of the White House. It’s just one of many examples of how the legislative branch seems to have ceded a power that the Constitution specifically enumerated to it over to an increasingly powerful executive branch.
Seeing as how they still control the purse strings, congress could easily take control of the matter at any time. But they won’t. Like me, they don’t want to have that decision weighing on their shoulders, nor do they wish to face the consequences should the decision not pan out. And as long as they can keep ignoring the Constitution, there’s no reason why should burden th
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