Re: Why I have a seething detestation of Liberals!
Quote QC
treedancer,
I believe I know what Boomer meant with his use of "lowest common denominator" (LCD (no, not a TV)). If the LCD is, oh lets say, a single cell then we can have no tests, no standards, no jobs that a single cell could not, pass, meet or fill. Please enlighten us as to the meaning you intended. Examples would be helpful.
Thanks.
[uThree examples--FEMA, Medicare, and Iraq-- should be sufficient to make this point.]
FEMA
They did not fail merely out of ignorance and inexperience. Their ineptness, rather, was active rather than passive, the end result of a deliberate determination to prove that the federal government simply should not be in the business of disaster management.
Upon assuming office, Bush turned to former aide Joe Allbaugh to run FEMA and then shifted it into the new department of Homeland Security.
Allbaugh, and his hand-picked successor Michael Brown, Long before Katrina destroyed New Orleans, Allbaugh and Brown were busy destroying FEMA. Privatizing the agency's programs, shifting attention away from disaster management, gleefully laughing as scores, of the most experienced staff left.
People cannot prevent disasters but they can prevent man made ones. That term is foreign to the ship of fools running the country now. They seem to have an ideological hostility toward any kind of competent management.
(Lowest common denominator =Disaster)
[uMedicare= prescription drugs for the elderly. ]
There were two paths open to the administration if they had been interested in creating an administratively coherent system of paying for the prescription drugs of the elderly. One was to give the elderly nothing and insist that every person assume the full cost of his or her medication. The other was to have government assume responsibility for the costs of those drugs.
So guess what this band of fools did? They refused to allow government to negotiate drug prices, thereby vastly inflating the costs. To make sure government agencies didn't administer the benefit, they lured in insurance companies with massive subsidies and imposed almost no rules on what benefits they could and could not offer.
Caught between the market and the state, this administration picked the worst features of each. It took the combined efforts of every faction in today's conservative movement to produce a public policy so removed from common sense.
(Lowest common denominator =Disaster)
[uIraq= Neocon were all for adventures abroad, and, in the aftermath of September 11,]
They won the president's support. But his pocketbook, was guarded by Rumsfeld.
Neocons wanted the Republican Party to live in the shadow of Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Rumsfeld insisted that military adventures be funded in the spirit of Robert A. Taft.
The conservative shout to the high heavens against government then rely on government to achieve their objectives, to me that smacks of hypocrisy of the highest order.
Then you have Rummy low-balling troop estimates in Iraq, to me that is criminal. Relying on government while refusing to pay for it.
He was hostile to the reconstruction of Iraq.Kinda reminds me of the administrations view of rebuilding New Orleans, but I digress.And his outright hostility towards Colin Powell, the only one in the administration the had seen hostile fire in his lifetime.
What incompetence, I better make this short I guess I could stay here all night and not come up with a Readers Digest version of what this band of fools has managed to bungle in Iraq.
1. [iTurning the management of Iraqi police forces over to private firms to the extent that Rumsfeld did, with catastrophic results.
2. Rumsfeld's hostility toward America's historic.
3. Rummy taking on a expensive war, but with the promise of being cheap and avoiding the loss of American lives. That dint work out to well did it?
4. I could go on, and on, but all you have to do is read the paper, and look up some old post it has been rehashed, over and over.]
(Lowest common denominator =Disaster)
Bonus examples.
The orgy of bribery and special interest in Congress is not the result of Tom DeLay's ruthlessness, as impressive a bully as he was. This conservative Presidency and Congress imploded, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.
Conservatism is a contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.
Lowest common denominator =Disaster)
