What can be done?

Scott Johnson says it’s The Gathering Storm, Part CLVI.

“Watching the Obama administration sell us out to Iran, as in the interim agreement entered into late last year, I feel despondent and hopeless. It’s the way I felt when the Democrats cut off American support of the South Vietnamese government and assured its fall to the Communists rolling into Saigon, or, more recently, when Obama withdrew all our forces from Iraq. What is to be done? I have no idea.

“John Kerry provides an element of continuity in Democratic politics going back to the fall of Saigon. He rose to prominence as a player in the Democratic production leading to our abandonment of South Vietnam. Kerry’s contribution was the dissemination of a demoralizing set of lies asserting the routine commission of war crimes by American forces. I bought his act at the time, but I was a sophomoric student who didn’t know any better. What is our excuse now?”

This is the lead to worries about capitulating to Iran’s nuclear intents. Such worries are also visible on a leftist blog Vox in its Threats to Americans, ranked (by actual threat instead of media hype) where WW III is number 5 and ISIS number 7. How can you tell it’s a leftist blog? Guns (#3) and climate change (#4) are in the list as well as all that stuff you own as a result of capitalism (Your own furniture, #8).

In Nevada, the ballot initiative for a margins tax illustrates the problem as well. It is another push by the teacher’s union for more money for education. It is promoted on the idea that big corporations should pay their fair share to help educate the children. What is frightening is what it says of the teachers’ abilities to think critically and learn from history and measure. The never ending campaign for more money for education over the last fifty years or so has yet to show positive results despite massive infusions of money. The thresholds to define those evil, greedy big businesses is low enough to catch many small businesses. The tax is on the margin and not the net so it may well end up creating a loss in some businesses (restaurants, for example). History also has a clear record that higher taxes tend to diminish and inhibit economic activity or drive it underground.  

The common thread: thinking driven by fantasy and not by reality. The results have often been tragic. Why do it over and over and over? Isn’t one definition of insanity when one keeps doing the same thing over and over and hoping that, this one more time will yield different results? As Scott says: “What is our excuse now?”

worried yet?