Friday, November 29, 2013

Banana Republic


Charles Krauthammer has a sobering column in a recent Washington Post about how the standing rules are being ignored or brazenly broken in both the Executive and Legislative branches of our government.  It is a compelling read ... see: Washington Post Opinion Piece.  If you skip this hyperlink, one of its many important quotes is:
We’ve now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans.
Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not.
The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.  
That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.
It saddens me that so few people of real influence see our government's unraveling and take to the barricades to denounce it. We used to have such people of stature ... they were called statesmen. Instead we are today served by Woody-Allen-style puppets who prance and pose trying to capture American's attention one step ahead of Mylie Cyrus's twerking.

We are in a sorry state of disrepair ... and as Charles Krauthammer closes his column with:
A Senate with no rules. A president without boundaries. One day, when a few bottled-up judicial nominees and a malfunctioning health-care Web site are barely a memory, we will still be dealing with the toxic residue of this outbreak of authoritative lawlessness.

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