Crazy Monday & Should We Want Obama to Fail?

Well, as alluded to in my last post, Monday wasn't much fun. My work laid off three people and reorganized their duties and the majority of the distribution was to my department. Its sad when you have to do what we did, but budget cuts had already been made and there wasn't much else to cut other than personnel. Some folks, honestly, weren't completely employed, so it made sense to reorganize those positions. But, of course, those who do the most are handed the tasking because its known that those tasks will get done. This is one of the truths in life, I'm afraid. If you do well, you get given more work. That's OK, my department's folks are all up to the challenge and they all took the news well.

I am convinced that a good portion of our economic woes are caused by the media. Even folks not in a bad position watch the nightly news and hear how "bad" it is and then they don't carry on as usual being afraid that something bad might happen to them. It rolls all through the economy as people stop spending. That's what caused ours...many physicians decided not to pay their membership dues and dues revenue dropped; educational product sales dropped and here we are...three more people living on the government via unemployment insurance. I'm not sure what is going to stop this vicious cycle. But I'm sure its not more giveaway programs. The ones already in place haven't worked and they didn't work back in FDR's day either. WWII is what saved us then but it appeared on the surface that the giveaway programs worked. As they say: "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." (Not sure where the quote is from.) I'm not advocating another World War, mind you, just illustrating that giveaway programs don't work for reversing an economic recession/depression.

On to my other topic...there has been a lot of talk this week about people saying they "Want Obama to fail" and a lot of backlash to that. I first read Meghan McCain's response. that of course she didn't want him to fail, he's our President. I tended to agree with her. Regardless of who our President is we should support him or her.

Then I saw the headline on CNN that said something like "Jindal defends people who want Obama to fail." My first thought was, "Oh no, not another Republican about to say stupid things...and I had such high hopes for him." It turns out that his point was that we don't want him to successfully install all these giveaway programs and other things that will cost us and our children trillions of dollars. Well, I agreed with that too.

So, I've come to the conclusion that there are two types of failure we're looking at here. The failure of the office and the failure of the policies. I have a big problem with letting the office fail. We should never let that happen and unless the President does something illegal, that we should always respect him or her and support them as the leader of our country, particularly in dealings with other countries. On the other hand, that doesn't mean we have to support or even like all (or even any) of the President's proposals. The President proposes, Congress disposes. I really oppose a lot of what President Obama is proposing because its just not smart. I am all for improving things, but not if that means that hard working people are asked to give up a substantial portion of their hard earned income and/or savings to give it to people who made stupid decisions or who are just plain lazy. What happened to personal responsibility?

In any event, I don't think that failed presidential policies = Obama failing as a president. I want him to succeed as our chief executive (he has made some reasonable moves with regard to foreign relations and organizing the government), but I want him to fail to get his policies passed (i.e. budget) the way it is now. Ideally, what I would like to see is that he really execute the bipartisanship that he promised prior to the election, but unfortunately I don't see him getting the rest of the Democratic party to go along with it. And to be fair, I don't think most of the Republicans will either. Whatever happened to statesmanship? I'm afraid its long gone in this town. So, I guess we're in for a long hard fight to try to prevent the worst from happening. And in the meantime, I'm doing everything I can think of to prepare to protect what I worked for from being conficated by the government and if that someday means I have to quit my job to lower our household income so we aren't considered "rich" than, so be it.

I'll write on cycling and music in my next post!