Congress: The Inept Versus The Incompetent

Tonight, the Democratic House passed the Health Care Reform bill and its corrective counter-part against every political maneuver and effort that the Republican party could rear in its opposition. After over a year of political constipation, the two parties conceived a bill that not only does not benefit from what a collaborative effort could have achieved; but which is and will be continuously beaten and whipped into an even more ineffective approach to correcting the Health Care system. This is because both sides will struggle to find ways to either interject additional requirements that pervert the overarching objective, or they will seek to remove or constrain the reach of the bill from areas that well funded groups and industries want eliminated. And with their lobbyist armies at their beck and call, they will coerce and tempt the Democratic and Republican members of Congress into serving their will.

And the American people will rally behind the rhetoric of whichever side they have chosen as their team, with the same passion and enthusiasm that they grant their favorite sports team. In fact, their allegiance and support of their party is as unimportant and irrelevant as their loyalty to their sports team. Many are members of their party because it’s a family tradition, and doesn’t require any thought or insight whatsoever. Others are one-issue fanatics, they are addicted to some idea or topic which they are fervently convinced is only supported or supportable by one party or the other. Then there are party affiliates who have bought into the ideologies that are presented as the underlying themes of the individual parties; not that these themes and principles mean anything to the party itself. And lastly, there are the unaffiliated and unaligned; you know the independents, and these folks are fundamentally orphans of the system. They cannot find a political family that will either accept them or more often that they can find any value or confidence in. But in their dissatisfaction with the Democrats and Republicans, they cannot find any other affiliation with which they can align themselves and through that collaboration achieve the goals that they seek for our society. Thus we have the political leadership that the Democratic and Republican parties have delivered.

What is the nature of that leadership? We have Democrats, who have hammered together an assembly of ideas and approaches that reflect vested interests and compromises that changes the Health Care system but does not move the system toward anything that will improve it. Expanding coverage requires that the system will have to handle more of the population, but does not impose on the system that it be better, affordable, or beneficial. We have Republicans, who work to thwart the efforts to change the system, not by offering superior approaches or improvements in the mechanisms that will deliver Health Care to the public; but by resisting the bill to only achieve their political goal of defeating their opponents with no consideration of their service to the American public.

If either of these parties had even a couple of true public servants, they would have stood up to their respective party leadership and refused to allow the American people to be abandoned and offered up on the political altar of these parties. An altar upon which the public is rendered for the benefit of ideology without regard to justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, the general welfare, or in securing our liberty.

Are these politicians compelled to act in these heinous ways? No, they are not. They are not trying to harm the American public, but they are unable to understand that they have demonstrated that they are incompetent in dealing with the issue. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown that they are able to come forward with proposals and plans that will address the very core factors that have produced the problems in the Health Care system today. I am sure that they would all love to come forward with ways to fix the problems with Health Care, but since they do not they demonstrate only their ineptness.

So lets vote these folks back in office again, or lets kick out everyone of them and replace them with members of their respective opposing party. Because that will clearly fix the problem, like it has every time before.

If the Democratic and Republican politicians are incompetent and inept, what must we say about the American public who persistently put them in these positions of power and responsibility?