I just stumbled across yet another comment on yet another political blog whining that everyone is trying to blame Bush for the mess we're in. The whiner noted that the current administration has spent umpty trillion dollars "all on its own" which can't, of course, be laid at the feet of Bush.
Except that it can, and unless you're a complete idiot you already know that.
Here's an analogy, because I love analogies and they work fairly well when some people have to be hit over the head to grasp a simple concept.
Let's say there's a house on the market. That house is 200 years old. It's had a lot of owners and residents in that 200 years. Some of them have been good caretakers (as evidenced by the fact that it's still standing) and others have been less good. Let's assume the owners before last left the house in really good shape when they turned it over to the last jokers, who completely sucked. The recently evicted folks lived in it for nearly a decade (in which a lot can go wrong with a 200-year-old house if you aren't careful) and they let it go completely to hell. Now the roof leaks, the pipes leak, there's water damage everywhere you look, termites and carpenter ants have made a good start on destroying the foundation ... in short, these assholes generally let it go to rack and ruin before they went into foreclosure, and then they tore out the appliances on their way out. Along comes a new family who can see that the house has a lot of problems, but it has "good bones" and it's worth saving, so they go ahead and buy it. They not only have to pay off the old debt the last owners left behind, but they're going to have to put new money into bringing it back to livable conditions. (A side benefit of this, by the way, is that it pleases the neighbors to no longer have to look out their windows and curse the sonofabitch who last lived there.) But livable isn't really enough, and doing actual restoration takes a fuckload more money. So, whose fault is it that the house has become a money pit? I submit that it's the fault of the previous owners, not the ones who took it on as a rehab project.
To add insult to injury, let's suppose that the previous owners (and their friends who helped trash it) continue to hang around the neighborhood complaining about the eyesore and the length of time it's taking to restore it and trying to convince the neighborhood folks that the damage to the house didn't happen on their watch and is really the fault of the new people. You'd have to be a real moron to buy that story, wouldn't you? Especially if you'd been living there watching it happen? Well, there are a lot of morons in this country.
3 comments:
AMEN!
Or maybe in reality it doesn't have "good bones" it actually has Osteoporosis and all the new owner is doing is building on something that is ultimately going to collapse under its own weight. Out political system is severly flawed and our country is suffering from mass mental illness.
Just my opinion of course and the opinion of a few millions of people around the country and the world. Every great nation that rises eventually falls under its own corruption.
Cedar, the "good bones" I speak of are the original ones ... not the shoddily made pins and joint replacements manufactured by starving children in third world countries. We have a pretty brilliant Constitution, if we could just get back to honoring it. Yes, it's been co-opted, corrupted and all but destroyed by greed and politics, but the foundation was a good one.
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