We have just come through the American election of 2010.
The liberals think the conservatives don’t get the message. The conservatives think the liberals don’t get the message. The president thinks the American people don’t get the message. The American people think the president doesn’t get the message. The Democrats think the Republicans don’t get the message. The Republicans think the Democrats don’t get the message. The Libertarians and Tea Party members think no one else gets the message. Everyone thinks he or she is right. It’s the other person, obviously, who is wrong.
Clearly, in the words of Strother Martin in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a fail-yah to communicate.
President Obama now says (in an interview aired on November 7, 2010, on the CBS-TV program 60 Minutes) that he doesn’t plan to change his agenda but will attempt to communicate better because people failed to understand his message. My own opinion is that people now understand his message very clearly. Perhaps they didn’t two years ago, but now they do, based not on what he has said but on what he has done. And a very clear majority of the American voting public have firmly rejected it (except in a few apparently very liberal places where people like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and Barney Frank managed, astoundingly, to get themselves re-elected). The president, however, seems to care more about what people in other countries think than what the majority of Americans think. We are expected to follow like sheep and accept whatever he has decided is best for us.
I have an announcement, folks: The American system doesn’t work that way. In fact, it works just the other way; he is supposed to do what the American voters want. In what used to be America (that is, according to the U.S. Constitution), the people were in charge. Abraham Lincoln probably phrased it best as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (and just so you know, Abraham Lincoln was not a Democrat; he was the first Republican president.) But right now President Obama does not appear very Abraham Lincolnesque. Instead, he seems to be Strother Martin and the rest of us have become Paul Newman.
Denial, my friends, is not a river in Egypt.
[end semi-rant mode]
If you are a U.S. citizen, whether you agree or disagree with me, I’d love to hear from you. But for this one post, if you are not a U.S. citizen, please follow Archie Bunker’s advice to his wife, Edith, and stifle yourself.
However, if you want to move here and become a citizen of the United States and vote in our elections, I say, in the words of Edith Bunker herself: “I welcome you with open arms.”
