A Letter To Our President

Dear President Obama:

It’s been just over a year since your election to the highest office in the land and I for one am very disappointed.  Your campaign of “Hope” and “Yes We Can” seems to have gone off track, perhaps through no fault of yours, but dangerously close to collapse on itself as those of us who desperately wanted a return to rational public policy both domestic and foreign sit in our homes and wonder how things could have gone so wrong.  Health care reform is a bust, you have no cooperation in Congress for any or your proposals, and the Republican party and their right wing crazies are still controlling our national discussion about who we are and where we are heading in the future 

I think the first mistake was to even posit that some “bipartisan” cooperation was the means to change the direction of the country.  If you listen to the Republicans you will surely hear that they are not at all interested in moving the nation forward, progressing our social programs, legislating equal rights for LGBT Americans or mounting an energy program in order that we are less dependent on foreign energy sources. 

If you listen to the Republicans what you will hear is the same ideology that the doddering icon of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, espoused 30 years ago.  This includes the sanctity of the free market, the world primacy of the American military, the trashing of individual rights, the demeaning of American workers, the Laffer Curve economic policy (low taxes, high investment market economy), and the fact that government is basically evil.  If you don’t think that these ideologies are still the Republican agenda, please take the time to listen to Sarah Palin’s speech at the Tea Bagger convention in Nashville, Tennessee.  Trust me, today, March 1, 2010, you will not find any significant deviance from the Ronald Reagan philosophy of 1980. 

With the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the last best gimmick for achieving your agenda is lost.  The so-called “iron clad” majority Democratic Senate is no more.  And 2012 will only provide the ideological foundation  that will ensure that nothing of your agenda will come to pass.  The Republicans and their conservative right wing crazies, do not care about how Americans are faring economically, or socially, or culturally.  They only care about their free market, laissez faire, government is bad, leave it to the private sector, ideology despite the fact that the past 30 years since the election of the right wing god Ronald Reagan has been a total failure. 

America ranks 34 the in health care delivery (even if it’s 24^th or 14^th is this what we should accept?), our public education system is a total failure – our high school graduates rank “piss-poor” in science and math, our families have less disposable income today than they had 30 years ago.  As a world power we continue to wield the big stick yet sink lower and lower on the scale of nations admired by other nations.  Is this success?  No, I think not.  And yet to hear the right wing pundits and legislators one would think that we only need to adopt their policies and we would reach nirvana.

Yeah, and Christ is coming down tomorrow to cure the world of all its ill and reward the faithful.  At least for those who believe.  This is not public policy or public governance. It is simply madness. It is not the America that I want. 

I’m sorry Mr. President, but it ain’t gonna happen by chance.  Unless you take the proverbial bull by the horns and tell all these crazies to go straight to hell we are going to continue to drift toward an intolerant, fascist, un-American country from which none of us will emerge unscathed. 

Sincerely,

Scott Sorg