January 26, 2011

Obligatory SOTU Set-to

The short version: For the first time in, z'ounds, thirty years or more, I found that -- after hearing a few excerpts of Lucky Lefty's oration -- any desire actually to watch the thing just drained away. Not only didn't I watch it, I casually and without a qualm deleted it off the DVR.

The Obamunist simply has nothing to say that I care to hear, and I have nothing to say about the State of the Onion report. So it goes.

The long, lugubrious version: I did listen to Paul Ryan's (R-WI, 96%) abbreviated rebuttal; it wasn't bad, but Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-MN, 100%) non-response response was much, much better: It was even shorter than Ryan's but included more specific proposals, for example mentioning the various policies with which House Republicans seek to replace ObamaCare.

But if I'm honest, I have to say that a speech, anybody's speech, is mere entertainment. Imagining that a great speech, by itself, will profoundly change anything is magical thinking.

A speech is an argument; a great speech is a killer argument. But even a killer argument must eventually be implemented... and thereby hangs the tail. I revere Ryan not for his pretty speech today but for his Roadmap for America's Future, about which we blogged here last August; the Roadmap gives fairly detailed and precise GPS (Government Pruning and Slashing) directions to Congress; enact them, and we veer away from the abyss and return, in a reasonable length of time, to fiscal, martial, political, and educational sanity.

Run away from them, and we end up in the quarry pit, covered by tons of rocks and dirt, with a bulldozer sitting atop us. And dang, not a single rocket in the launchers!

I'm more of a big-picture guy; but that too is more important than the pretty speech by Paul Ryan -- or a speech by the pretty Michele Bachmann. I've tried to point out how ridiculous is our current "dilemma," as it is an entirely self-created self-immolation:

1. We lack domestic energy resources because we have chosen not to develop our own natural domestic energy resources.
2. Our enemies have billions of dollars to spend attacking us because we pay them billions of dollars for their oil... which we needs must do because of (1) above.
3. We lose freedoms every day because terrorists attack us... which happens because of (2) above, and because we have chosen not to implement proven behavioral profiling protocols.
4. The health-insurance market and free-enterprise medicine are breaking down because we have chosen to regulate the market and free enterprise medicine out of existence.
5. We have a staggering Social Security and Medicare unfunded liability because we have chosen not to invest the confiscated moneys (better, to allow the contributers to invest the moneys themselves) in financially productive investment instruments, preferring instead to spend the supposedly sequestered funds on day-to-day expenses. (If a private company treated its pension funds the way government does, the entire BoD and all corporate officers would spend twenty years as guests of the state.)
6. We have an education crisis because we have rejected expansion of successful private and parochial schools and homeschooling in favor of the factory model of the early Industrial Revolution, when the point of "education" was to teach prospective workers how to read the directions on a lathe or drill press.
7. We have rampant crime because we have seized every opportunity to loose criminals upon society, due to grotesquely misbegotten empathy with evil.
8. We have a teen-sexuality crisis because we have chosen to prematurely sexualize children, and on and on; so it still goes.

Does any crisis or catastrophe loom over the United States that was not willfully and recklessly wrought upon ourselves, through the malfeasance and nonfeasance of rent-seeking special interests, the megalomaniacal regulators who implement the special interests' pet projects, the elected officials who fail to oversee and rein in those regulators, and We the People who vote in corrupt candidates, again and again?

Step Number One along the road to American recovery is, strangely enough, exactly the same, word for word, as Rule Number One of deep holes: For God's sake, stop digging!

If we would just stop digging, most of our problems would be dust in the wind.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 26, 2011, at the time of 2:26 PM

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