Through a truly Byzantine coordination of chance and militant neglect on the part of a third party, I happened to make the acquaintance of a couple who I might otherwise never have met, even though they are one home of only five within 200 yards of mine. The unlikely circumstances of our meeting are only second to the implausible nature of our friendship, mainly due to the fact that they are a couple in their late 80s, and I'm a 40-year old father of two small children. Oh, and that intervening 200 yards is comprised of wild forestland, a precipitous 300 foot drop in elevation, and a river. We are not people who would generally mix.
The other night, my wife and I made the 5 mile trip to their house (yes, we have to travel five miles to get 200 yards) to spend an evening with our friends, and the conversation inevitably turned to politics, as it always did. I find these kinds of discussions with people who lived through the Great Depression, WWII, the Red Scare, and the Space Race fascinating. The fact that I hold the same regard for government and its utility in the lives of ordinary people that a man near 90 does, despite the great gulf between our experiences and our homes, gives me great hope for the future of our country. Even as the insane mechanizations of cranks caught up in the eschatology of the American endgame seem all but assured to maintain their eminence in a country with the attention span of a brain damaged Jack Russell Terrier, the fact that I can still find corresponding ideas in the mind of a man 50 years my senior must speak to the possibility that half a century from now I will see them in a man 50 years my junior.
At one point in the conversation, one of my hosts leaned over the table and said something that came back to me as I trawled the Heritage Foundation's website for fodder. "When our war started, everyone was in it because we all had to work to win it."
Of course, it's chewed steak, the subject of our national obsession with forgetting our veterans. We've reneged, consistently and with great dedication and vigor, on every promise ever made to the men and women willing to place themselves between us and whatever boogie man our leaders have recently concocted over there. This is nothing new, and it shouldn't now surprise anyone that while only 8 percent of Americans have the honor to call themselves veterans, 16 percent of all adult homeless people in this country are veterans. We discard our warriors with no less alacrity than we trades our Playstations in for XBoxes. "Break all you want, we'll make more," should be the official motto of the Department of Defense.
We forget our warriors, and lately we've even forgotten their wars, but one would be forgiven for experiencing some sense of cognitive dissonance in knowing that the very people who were most energetic in cheerleading the invasions of Afghanistand and later Iraq, have themselves tossed those inconvenient, costly adventures down the memory hole with all their other collossal blunders.
More below the fold.
The Heritage Foundation is sort of widely known for their mercenary intellectualism. Have a pet issue? Can't get the reality-based community to buy into your crackpot idea? Got cash? But it would seem that the one thing they lack is any sense of their own history. The chart below purports to depict the alarming trend of President Obama's uncaged spending.
Of course, pictures being so very convincing where words and actual numbers are difficult to assimilate, I'm sure that many a mouthbreather and disinterested citizen will view Heritage's simplistic chart and mutter something like, "Huh. That sounds bad," and then amble off to tell five of their friends some bare approximation of what they've seen, thereby ensuring that public opinion will turn against this president for the sins of his predecessor.
Everyone here has seen this chart, depicting the breakdown of our deficit by policy decision. If you'll note, the lion's share belongs, as liberals and progressives and intellectuals and economists predicted it would 10 years ago, to President and Imperial Highness George W. Bush. But, there was one organization that wasn't swayed by warnings that tax cuts don't raise revenues, and they're the same people today who want to tag President Obama with President Bush's spending. Yup.
All of which, obviously enough, leads us finally to the chart with which anyone interested in engaging with the reality of our current economic situation with actual numbers, rather than jiggered figures that tell a tale not remotely connected with the attendant rhetoric should be familiar. Voila!
Of course the debt belongs to George Bush and groups like the Heritage Foundation. Of course the profligate spending isn't Barack Obama's. Of course Republicans are hypocrites who have absolutely no credibility on all matters related, in even the most tangential way, to money, finance, economics, government, or family values. There simply is no argument that can pass the straight face test. Republicans are deficit peacocks, and it's particularly ironic that they feel they have the upper hand in budget negotiations and debt ceiling wars.
But you want to know the absolute worst thing about the debate raging in Congress and all across the country? The thing that turns these tragicomic times through which we're living from Midsummer Nights Dream into Merchant of Venice? It is, quite simply, this, the one person who should know better than anyone that the spending spree that mired our national economy in so much debt and is currently slowing our economy occurred under the past president is the current one, and he has bought into a breed of the Heritage Foundation's lie. And he's apparently convinced of the notion that cutting critical government programs is the only way to set things aright.