Dear Congress:
You suck. Every last damned one of you.
You’ve been stinking up the joint for a long time now, but this week’s craptacular implosion of competence known as the deficit reduction super-committee deadlock was the rotten cherry atop your impotence sundae. Seriously? In two months, you couldn’t find a deficit reduction plan that all 12 of you agreed to?
Oh, what am I saying? Of course you couldn’t, because none of you the barest shred of courage necessary to peek out of your stifling ideological boxes for even a nanosecond. If you were a Democrat, you wanted tax hikes on the rich, if you were a Republican you wanted cuts, and there was simply no middle ground because god forbid you entertained an approach that wasn’t graven in stone by your respective parties.
And now we’re already deep within the phase of the quote-unquote process in which you start finding someone to blame for this mess other than yourselves. It’s the other guys whose ideas sucked. It’s the other guys who refused to budge from their position and compromise. It’s the other guys’ fault, not yours.
No, it is yours. Every member of the super-committee is to blame for allowing themselves to get further sucked into the morass of divisive partisan politics and flagrantly ignore your own rallying cries about “what the American people want.”
What the American people want is for you to fix the financial hellscape you’ve fashioned for this nation with your petty bickering and misplaced priorities and pissing contests over whether the left or the right is morally superior and unadulterated selfishness. Right now you all care only about two things: getting your jobs back in 2012 and getting your guy into the Oval Office. Everything else, like the public welfare, the public’s trust and faith in the system, the nation’s standing on the global stage? None of that truly matters to you — ANY of you. If it did, you’d be more willing to throw yourselves on the metaphorical grenade to save your constituents.
At this point in time, I do not believe that any single one of you elected federal officials give a toss about me, the country, the economy, job creation — I believe you only care about their political agendas and padding their own pockets. The concept of shared sacrifice you talk about, that stops right at your doorstep; I don’t see any of you giving up your six-figure salaries any more than I see you breaking away from the official party rulebook, and I don’t expect to see one of you manifest anything vaguely resembling courage in the name of breaking the deadlock that is slowly suffocating everyone in this country and driving us to fracture even more into our own little movements that achieve little beyond inflaming preexisting philosophical rifts to the boiling point and beyond.
You are supposed to represent the public. You are supposed to do what we want you to, and what we want you to do is act like goddamned adults.
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Dear fellow voters,
Did you agree with any of what I just said?
Well, it’s your fault too.
Seriously, we put these people into positions of power, and we encourage their misbegotten feelings of untouchability by failing to hold them accountable.
Sure, right now you’re saying “Yeah! Let’s clean house and get these idiots out of office!” but, chances are, you’re not going to follow through. Even if you go vote — we have not exceeded a 60 percent voter turnout rate since 1968 — you know what you’re going to do? You’re going to look at the ballot, you’ll see the name of the guy that’s been there for years and/or belongs to the same party you do, and you’re going to think, “Sure, Congress is a cesspit, but MY GUY isn’t part of the problem” and you’re going to send him back to work in January.
You’ll rationalize the decision a thousand different ways, considering his “clout” in Congress, how he meshes with your own ideology, and all the good he’s done during his time in office, all the while turning a blissful blind eye to the fact that he’s part of a deeply entrenched political body that is more mired in myopic partisan bickering than perhaps any in history.
Your guy? He sucks. He sucks just as hard as the other guy. It’s time you manned up and admitted it. It’s time you displayed the same courage you berate Congress for lacking and throw the current guy out, even if it means sending in someone with whom you do not agree on anything (and if you’re really so hung up on the party aspects of it, try voting the incumbent out during the primaries — you know, those things that allegedly give you control over the process but are so driven by the party’s wants, needs, and money that they’re practically worthless…and that’s our fault too).
The definition of insanity, it’s been said, is repeating the same actions over and over while expecting a different result. The incumbency rate for the US House of Representatives has not dropped below 80 percent once in the past 30 years, and the last time the incumbency rate fell below 75 percent for the US Senate was 1980. That means this nation is at least three-quarters batcrap insane.
It’s way past time to end the insanity. Stop protesting, stop occupying, stop posting acidic comments on blogs and news sites and go DO SOMETHING. Do something real. Do something meaningful. Take control of your damned lives.
