|
|
Editorial -- 1/28/99
"We could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right."
-- Bill Clinton, in his State of the Union address
"What's the difference between Washington, Nixon and Clinton?"
Washington couldn't tell a lie, Nixon couldn't tell the truth, and Clinton doesn't know the difference.
-- my favorite Clinton joke
I am not sure what shows more arrogance: Clinton's staring into the camera on January 26th last year and saying that he did not have sex with "that woman" or the remarks quoted above.
Perhaps he has not committed an impeachable offense. But character has got to count for something somewhere. This is what the American people get when they elect someone that everyone knows is even more untrustworthy than the usual politician. Here is a man who has never made a mortgage payment or any of the usual things that average Americans, who have not spent their adult lives as elected government officials, struggle with every day. Does any among us thinks the government knows how to better spend the money they earn? Remember, taxes is really a method of redistributing wealth. I don't know about you, but I am tired of about half what I make being redistibuted by one government or another.
I find it interesting that this man considered George Bush out of touch; but Mr. Bush had not only made mortgage payments, he also had to meet payroll and fought well in his generation's war. But, that election is over. Bush had no more to do with the failing economy than Clinton has to do with today's economy. Folks, our economy is a system that runs in cycles. If you study the work of Dr. Deming and apply it to economic systems, you will realize that the more we muck around with things we can't model even with todays supercomputers, the more we screw them up. The biggest factor in the American economy is consumer confidence. If people had decided that the "Asian flu" last year was going to have a detrimental impact, and had cut back on their spending and investing, we would now be in a recession. For some unknown reason people continue to believe that things will get even better and keep pumping up the prices of Internet stocks like Amazon and Yahoo (a great exanple of the bigger fool theory.) So throwing Bush out of office because of the economy was not a smart move; but Americans will always vote their pocketbooks. Maybe next time the people are presented with such a clear-cut difference in men's characters, they will remember the consequences of ignoring those differences in the past.
Anyway, we only have two more years of this guy to put up with. The problem is that people I respect either don't have a prayer (Bradley) or won't run (Jack Kemp) so I don't know that we'll be that much better off in 2001.
As Tom Clancy points out in one of his books about Jack Ryan, we need more "average" people in public service and fewer arrogant damn lawyers. Let's get some soccer moms, farmers, and school teachers (not professors like Newt) in Washington.
But, as Dennis Miller says at the end of his rants, that's my opinion, I could be wrong.
What's yours?