House of Eratosthenes

The democrats are infuriated to watch the government do its thing, six years out of every ten, under Republican — and therefore evil — management. During those six years out of ten, the government is the very incarnation of evil. Overthrowing “sovereign nations that did not attack us,” getting inner city kids hooked on crack, waterboarding “detainees” who didn’t do anything…et al…but then the other four years in ten the best thing we can do is expand the government’s authority, give it more functions to perform.

And the functions are intimate and personal. Health care. Food inspection. Creating jobs with the Obama-stimulus…which, as Ed Morrissey notes, passed with no significant Republican support at all.

[T]hey’ve begun to notice that no one is paying them much attention, especially not Obama:

House Democrats feel like jilted lovers.

They’re looking down Pennsylvania Avenue for some sign of affection from President Obama in the White House. But all they feel they’re getting in return is the back of his hand.

“How is it that the House Democrats played such an important role [in the majority], and all of a sudden [the White House says], ‘Forget it, we’ll work with the Senate and the Republican leadership?’ ” asked Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), vice chairman of the Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee.

Er … seriously? Perhaps Cuellar needs a little help with mathematics. Republicans have a fairly significant although not historically large majority in the House, and therefore can pass almost anything through normal rules without any input from Democrats. Cuellar and his caucus are irrelevant to any budget deal.

Cuellar should be very familiar with this phenomenon. When it came time to discuss a stimulus package in early 2009, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi locked Republicans out of the law-drafting process. Obama at that time told Republicans, “I won.” It turned out to be a big political miscalculation, since Democrats ended up passing Porkulus with almost no Republican support (only three votes in the Senate), and its failure ended up being blamed squarely on Democrats. Now, Cuellar and other Democrats want people to pretend they matter, but even Obama can’t muster up that much imagination.

This is the scary thing about democrats in Congress. It’s like they have a blind spot in any direction that involves someone else deciding something.

There’s a certain software company I’ve criticized often, because their products work extremely well when they work — and they don’t when they don’t. The deciding factor seems to have something to do with whether I’m using the products in the way the engineers anticipated when they built them.

There is value in this, of course. Thirty years is a long time to be using a company’s software products, so something must be working. But if it only works when I do things exactly the way I’m supposed to, it makes you wonder what in the human/machine coupling really is the human, and what is the machine. Who’s using who. Well you know what? I don’t like having that relationship with my office equipment…and I don’t like having it with my government. I’m not given much motive to change my mind about it, when I see the government operates under the premise of “Yay, we’ve been voted in, we’re here for life, everything is always going to be decided by us and our pals.” It’s just not a good way for a system to work.

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“Even Obama Can’t Muster That Much Imagination”Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

“Even Obama Can’t Muster That Much Imagination”
Tuesday, June 28th, 2011