I'm worried that uneducated lunatics are at the wheel.
Congress is just flapping around like a chicken without a head. I can't believe we the people elected these people. They are imbeciles.
I blame congress lack of leadership 100% and can't wait to get those people out of there. This is their show & ideas & policies, and its a mess.
I don't necessarily agree that they're uneducated, but I do agree that sometimes they seem like lunatics. They just refuse to grasp the reality of this situation.
A lot of our Congress members (and other government leaders) are well-educated, but they are not necessarily the best people for the job. My firm is populated almost entirely with people who are smarter (and better educated) than most members of Congress. Everyone stays in the private sector because they can make more money that way and still wield a significant amount of influence in DC.
I think something that people don't appreciate is that we do not get the stripe of candidate today that we got throughout the 20th Century. I personally believe that the reason for that is that today, everything you've ever done (and trust me, people with power always have skeletons in the closet) is going to get figured out by somebody and broadcast on CNN 24/7. Well qualified people who made a couple of dumb decisions in their past will stay away from the political limelight because they don't want the embarrassment. For example, I noticed that one of Obama's candidates for (I think) Commerce Secretary backed out and the reason floating around DC was that she didn't want to deal with the vetting process because of what it might turn up, not necessarily something SHE did, but something someone in her family did. People just don't want to deal with that.
Sometimes, you can be Barack Obama and have millions of people ignore your questionable decisions from your youth, or Ted Stevens, who somehow managed to almost win an election despite being convicted of a crime
during the campaign season. Ted Stevens is too old to care what people think of him; he's addicted to the power he had in DC. I think that for many people, Obama represents something powerful (and, I'll say it: hopeful) enough to make his dumb decisions and associations not matter so much. Most political candidates don't have that luxury, and even if they did, wouldn't want to deal with the public humiliation and scrutiny.
At the end of the day, the people who are most qualified to lead stay out of government because it isn't worth it. A Congressman makes what... $200K a year? Something like that? Seems like a lot of money. It isn't. Not compared to what the truly qualified can make outside of the government. We have vacancies on federal courts that have been open for years because no one from the private sector who is well qualified wants to be subjected to the Senate confirmation process
and take an astronomical pay cut.
Whew. I apologize for the rant. I tend to get upset when thinking about this because I know so many people who would do great jobs in the government, but who won't do it because they either (a) don't want to give up the money, or (b) they don't want to go through the vetting and media scrutiny. Again, it's not necessarily because
they even did something wrong; often, it's that they don't want to subject their kid to the humiliation (see, e.g., Sarah Palin and her Christian, pregnant, teenage daughter). Some people do it anyway because they care more about the power, but most people would rather protect their families. So, we end up with these twits who care more about the influence and the petty political games than they do about actually accomplishing anything useful.
