Maher: American is the land of get nothing done
Bill Maher is distressed about America’s lack of capacity to do good things and stop doing bad things. Our mechanism for meaningful change is completely broken.
Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can’t make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there’s still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can’t make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress’s climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions… by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where’s the fire? Oh yeah, it’s where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States! We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn’t start until 2016.
What do we need?
a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, “If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense.” So let’s start from scratch.
I find Bill Maher to be especially insightful–he cuts right through the BS over and over. This particular article by Maher was especially well written.
An oft-cited reason to ignore this standstill is that Congress was intended to be slow and deliberate. I am completely sympathetic to this excuse- I like that Congress is slow- but the process has gotten out of step. The problem is that the President can do things quickly, like declare massive de-facto wars, without support or recourse. Congress can only respond to rapid-fire, powerful Presidencies in its usual lumbering way. If the right to declare war still hung in the hands of Congress, if the President didn’t have and abuse such unequal power, I think things would seem less dire and we would not want a breakneck speed government.