March 2, 2015
Jonathan Toman
[email protected]
Boy, there are some incompetent folks in government. Some things will never change.
But there’s an organized, planned level of intentional bungling that has us all in trouble. Politicians spend more time worrying about their next campaign than actually doing their job.
Often, politicians are in the news due to their “decision” regarding what office they are going to run for in the next election cycle. This is in stark contrast to what they should be in the news for: how they are doing at what they were elected to do.
Campaigning is fun. You get to smile at folks and kiss babies, practice your parade wave and read speeches other people wrote for you in front of sympathetic crowds who think you are the reincarnation of God on Earth.
Doing your job is not. When you have to help run a country, you have issues like the economy to figure out. That’s tough. That requires effort, a certain ability to put your nose to the grindstone and get things done.
Which would you choose to spend more of your time doing?
So, our politicians spend more of their time worrying about the next election than their current job. But how do they ensure that nobody notices or that we don’t care? That’s the next step, and they start with speech-making.
Many of our politicians are great public speakers.
So was Adolf Hitler.
They’re great at making promises to dumb voters who really have no idea. Many of them suck at their job, and we don’t know or care.
We should throw them out, those that have no bloody idea what they are doing. But we don’t. Why?
They are such masters of propaganda, such masters of their image that we never think worse of them even when they do screw up.
As a result, our most incompetent people end up in our most important positions. And they decide our future. Unfortunately, the competent people, the ones that want to be held accountable for their actions, are run out of office by misguided voter vengeance.
It seems our political differences are borne out of what party precedes their name, a kind of blind hate reserved for the dumb masses under a dictator, not the required critical thinkers of a democracy. We take the propaganda as Gospel.
So, when it comes to evaluate what an elected leader has done, it comes down to three reasons why we do nothing.
First, we are blinded by our visionless hate of the “wrong party.” Second, politicians cloud the job they are doing with rhetoric and blame, and they’re damn good at it. Finally, they distract us with the continuous election mentality.
That mentality forces us to forget what we were mad about, and get back on the bandwagon two to six years later. And it’s sneaky. We will be just about ready to really (and I mean really) evaluate our elected officials when they spring the next election on us.
“Get pumped, America, because I’m back! Except I’m going to be more important this time!”
And we get swept up in the election tide, and the person that should have been harshly critiqued and evaluated ends up reelected or promoted.