Inherit the Wind

by Dennis Green

Dick Cheney has now pronounced Barrack Obama a “One-term President.” I doubt that he comprehends the implications of what he’s saying, anymore than the Birthers understand that their attempts to have Obama disqualified for the office because of his foreign birth would simply put Joe Biden in the White House and Nancy Pelosi one step closer.

The Republicans calculate that simply by blocking key legislation, they will cause Obama and his posse to fail, and that then they will be swept into office in the midterm elections. They also believe that Mitt Romney, or Sarah Palin, or someone like Ron Paul will defeat Obama in 2012.

Let’s assume they’re right, that merely by practicing obstructionism they can achieve their aim, which is recapturing all three branches of the federal government. By then, without serious reforms in our health care system, our deficit and debt, our economic growth and unemployment, unfunded entitlement programs and a wildly out of control defense budget, what, exactly, will they inherit?

Break wind, and you will get the answer.

Systems like the federal government do not cope well with paradigm shifts, but the challenges facing America constitute not just another cyclical change, or the bursting of yet another economic bubble. For all of these changes were unthinkable — that growth would drop from 3% to 2%, that unemployment, real unemployment, would increase to 17%, that debt would increase to 20% of GDP, that health care premiums would increase as much as 39% and total costs of the system to 17% of our GNP, twice that of any other industrialized nation. And without reform, it can only get worse.

The unthinkable always produces a paradigm shift. If our government has shifted from a representative democracy to a parliamentarian form of government, where, if the ruling coalition fails, it is dissolved, the Republicans will be as much at the mercy of that paradigm shift as the Democrats are today.

And if it now takes a 60-vote majority for the Dems to get anything passed, so will it take a parliamentary-style majority for the GOP to do squat as well. Everybody can play that game, and the only losers will be the people who are out of work, or who lose their small businesses, or their investments to a dwindling economy, or a corroded infrastructure, students in failing schools and the retired and disadvantaged without a safety net, as well as the victims of terrorists in an increasingly dangerous world.

Social Security and Medicare — without reforms — will go broke. Energy policy will remain captive of Chevron and BP. An estimated 400,000 Americans will perish every year because they don’t have health insurance coverage, and another 100,000 will be lost to hospital-acquired infections and medical errors. Natural selection or broken systems?

And in the meantime, every American president will be a one-term president, and Congress will simply switch parties, without any other real change, every two or four years. Our government will come to resemble the Italian parliament, where nothing ever gets done!

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. An activist Neo-Conservative government under George W. Bush was just as wasteful and foolish as any liberal, out of control executive branch ever was. Even Jimmy Carter didn’t bomb Baghdad and then proclaim “Mission Accomplished” seven years before we had, as we do now, 100,000 U.S. troops still fighting and dying in that country. Better a government in gridlock.

So long, Baby! Or rather, Ciao Bambino!

©2010 Dennis Green