COMMENTARY: Will the Real American Leaders Please Stand?
By Joseph J. Honick
With a nation staggering through a recession that threatens the
employed as well as those out of work….one war only half over and
another with no definable conclusion…money drying up for important
public services and still more challenges to come…the best the
Republicans can come up with is a commitment to destroy everything and
anything this administration comes up with.
On the flip side, the President and his inarticulate minions, many of whom never were vetted by the Senate, are stammering through a confused approach to leading the country.
The nation is entitled to more and better, especially since these competing forces, diluted by something like the decaffeinated tea party, only want to win or retain the powerful seats in the Congress that makes laws we have to live by.
So…real American leaders please stand up.
One major and riveting focus for the right wing is the recently passed health reform legislation, the cryptic law that even supporters cannot explain to the people who will have to use it and even those who will administer it. While there are rational concerns over this new law which Republicans threaten to deny funding, the other side to all that is their own failure to create something workable during the eight years they owned the White House and didn’t mind embroiling us in endless and costly conflict in the Middle East.
In fact, the projected cost of the new health reform, according to its detractors, would be just under a trillion dollars while the ongoing wars already have exceeded $1.5 trillion and still going up.
According to reports in the New York Times, Republican leadership will go after the law anyway they can. If it isn’t possible to sink the whole deal, country club Republican leader John Boehner declared,”They’ll get not one dime from us!” he told the Cincinnati Enquirer and emphasized: “Not a dime. There is no fixing this.”
How impressive it might have been had he proclaimed his sense the law needed fixing, and that he and his colleagues have developed positive ideas because they did realize the need for some kind of revision to what is going on today….policies that not only confuse patients but the hospitals, doctors and insurance companies trying to handle their needs. And that does not consider the employers forced into some kind of program and penalties to individuals who don’t buy some kind of insurance.
To be sure, there is much work to sharpen the Health Reform Act that was pushed through Congress and signed by the President to great fanfare, but an all out assault without reference to reason is no better.
But that is just one aspect of the GOP all out assault with still no offered means to bring the costly war to a conclusion, how to solve our international economic deficiencies as well as our domestic problems.
And the Republicans have a new problem this time around: a rebel outfit calling itself the Tea Bag party and cheerfully bankrolled by couple of billionaires known as the Koch Brothers and recruiting men and women whose only chant is they don’t like government we have and want to “take it back.”
Into this setting come the likes of a carefully produced act named Sarah Palin and a shifty but brilliant Newt Gingrich running here and there as cheerleaders for confusion.
In less that two months, half of the House of Representatives and the United States Senate will be on the market.
Will real American leaders be among those filling those seats when it’s over, or simply another roll call of partisans who couldn’t care less about anything but demolishing the opposition at any cost to the people?
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Joseph J. Honick is an international consultant to business and government and writes for many publications, including huntingtonnews.net. Honick can be reached at joehonick@gmail.com