You can never replenish time
David Gregory used this cartoon as a springboard on today’s Meet the Press episode. It was during the second act of the show: the political roundtable. While MTP can really be annoyingly frustrating to watch as the David works to get pols to say something honest and sincere, the second act can be so much more refreshing. Today, during Act 1, he had on a set of security folks talking about the recent terror attack/attempt and the various issues surrounding it. Did Obama react to slowly? How could this have happened? How we can we prevent it from happening?
Anybody who has played a game where you are being attacked by a swarm of nimble/dangerous creatures realizes that it is impossible to prevent every attack, but you do your best; and doing “your best” is subjective. Therefore open to criticism, as the former VP too took shots at Obama. As it turns out, it’s the “appearance” of toughness and using cowboy tactics that makes the certain people happy and secure. Obama they cannot grok, so their fear of the unknown – and to them unknowable – makes them paranoid and angry, hence the tea party movement. At least the leading non-political counter terrorism official, John Brennan, took Cheney to task. I wonder if Cheney understands that his “tourettes-like” outbursts fund the democrats coffers with donations.
But I digress. The real issue of the day was reset expectations: act II What we learned in the 2000s was (thanks to Tom Brokaw,
- The U.S. is not invulnerable to attack from small groups that will terrorize us on our own soil
- People are really greedy – they’d happily send somebody else’s kid off to Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan/Yemen
to fight and die, but won’t tolerate paying more taxes to support them - General Motors, as a proxy for 20th century US business/manufacturing leadership is not invulnerable, but in fact, is nearly dead
- We cannot all afford to own homes. Loaning people money form home they cannot afford is a bad idea
But what will we do with these hard-learned lessons? Sacrifice a bit for the future of our children and our country? come together politically to solve problems instead of bickering endlessly and getting little done?
naaaa! what fun is that??
Let’s see how many times we can run up the credit card partying, get the government to bail us out and tend to us when we need help, and then – like a bunch of spoiled teenagers – criticize everybody else but ourselves when there are problems.
On the other hand, maybe old Tom Brokaw has a better way to look at it:
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