When Better is Not Good Enough

Bill Clinton and the DLC democrats have made a mantra of making things “better”, which has allowed them great latitude for obfuscation. The question is not whether things can be made better. The issue is can they be made good enough. Reality determines whether policy and action are good enough, not slight improvements that fail to deal with the necessities.

This thought came to mind as I read of Hillary Clinton urging the removal of the puppet president of Iraq who was supposed to bail this country out of the transparently stupid attack on Iraq and now that the situation has devolved into the chaos knowledgeable people predicted, she and other Democrats who voted for this immoral insanity are trying to pin the blame on their chosen Iraqi instead of themselves. Why?: To maintain their electability. This is absolutely disgusting, when the carnage they did not have the courage to resist in the first place is now to be blamed on the Iraqis themselves. If this timid, weasel, mentality is to reside in the White House as of 2009, the great and tough decisions that are needed to direct this country away from the narcissistic self interest that has characterized it over the last forty years, including the whole notion of being a superpower, will not be made. We badly need an administration that can create a new vision for this country and this planet in which we use our resources to solve the massive problems humanity faces instead of exacerbating them. We must think real world when we consider these candidates. Forget accepting electability as the fundamental criterion in evaluating candidates. That criterion leads all too easily to shallowness, irrelevance and the disasters they create in the real world. Create electability by demanding an end to hype and deception. Demand that the real world be the focus of politics, not winning an election when there is no evidence the winner has any grasp of mankind’s dire needs and even less a grasp on what needs to be done to address those needs. We must hold our elected officials accountable, but we must also hold ourselves accountable first by insuring the fundamental importance of our demands. To do this we need to think rigorously and thoroughly about what this world and this nation need most.

Bob Newhard