Seeing the Dow Jones drop lucky sevens on Monday had many pointing fingers at Congress for rejecting the good old bailout. From the start, I have personally been against this bailout and believe that it would be nothing more than putting a Band-Aid on a deep wound. More troublesome to me is this big game of “grabass” that Washington has been playing.
As one would predict, Republicans absolutely hated this bill, as they tend to believe that the government should not interfere with the free market economy. Fair. Can someone please tell me what kind of Republican George Bush is in thinking that this bailout is good? It amazes me how this guy can even be ass-backwards with his party’s beliefs after all that I have seen of his policies.
Last Wednesday, Mr. Bush decided to play the fear card on prime-time television and speak about the economy. He spoke about more bank failures (because we haven’t bailed out enough, right?), drops in the stock market and how the housing market situation would become worse.
Why would he use this method again? I don’t get it. Does he think that we have forgotten Iraq?
Last week, we saw John McCain suspend his campaign because he felt it was more important to fix the economy with his buddies in Washington. Ever heard of the Spice Girls’ expression, “I need a man, not a boy who thinks he can?” Well, I take this to heart when I vote for the next president. I want a guy in the White House who knows he can deal with several things at once and not one who thinks he can. John McCain couldn’t even handle keeping his campaign active while “dealing” with the economy. What will happen if we get attacked by Russia or some scumbag terrorists, are in a depression and gas is $10 a gallon all at once? I don’t know about Obama, but I think McCain would need to do one thing at a time. I mean, his campaign may have overwhelmed him greatly while his colleagues were scrambling to figure out a bailout.
Over the past few days, McCain (who, by the way, supported this bill as well) was designated with a mission: to convince as many Republican congressmen to vote for this as possible. My favorite part of recent events took place on Monday before the House voted. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, took the stage to make a speech. And let me tell you, it was not a “Let’s rescue the economy together!” rally either as one may have thought it would be. No. She goes before the House and calls Bush’s economic policies reckless, while essentially cheering for the Democrats and denouncing “some” Republicans who are against the bill, as they are allowing chaos to occur. Whether this message is accurate or not is not my problem. My issue here is who, in his or her right mind, would be so stupid as to say this, when some of these votes are extremely sensitive? This political trick to then blame the Republicans for the failure of the passage of this bill was just plain wrong.
We are in times where we need these politicians to do something together. These are not the best of times to be debating on this while pulling stunts left and right. What this country needs is a leader who will lead and not scare us till we shit our pants and support their decisions out of fear.
These past few days were a huge disappointment to many of us who saw how Washington really behaves. Whether we supported or were against the bill, and whether we were for Obama or McCain, an ugly side of politics was revealed to us. If we let some of these people running our country stay next year, things will not get better. As much as the presidential election matters, so do those elections in the Senate — 35 seats are up for a vote — and in the House, where all 435 seats are in our hands. Let’s punish those who need a time-out and get some new heads in there. Maybe then our country will be on a better track.