Where is the outcry by our congressional representatives?  I find their silence chilling and haunting. 

Silence is not what I’m hearing from real people on the streets.  They didn’t think Iran posed any imminent danger, not until Bush started provoking Iran with inflammatory rhetoric and talk of preemptive attacks.

My question tonight is why the silence?  The democrats sat on their collective asses while this same exact scenario played out regarding Iraq.  Where is the demand that the president quit provoking Iran and do some real diplomacy?  Why no collective demand for the president to be censured for his dozens of previous abuses of power?  Why aren’t our leaders telling him to put a cork in it and think of SOME OTHER approach? 

Do our representatives and senators really believe that Bush has any realistic plan for what to do after American missiles start blowing up empty Iranian trailers and scorching Iranian children.  Oh, I almost forgot; there IS a plan, and it’s full of lots of don’ts. The plan is DON’T COUNT THE CIVILIAN DEAD.  Those numbers would undermine American support for the war.  And don’t Count the dead adult civilians either.  Don’t count the homes we turn into rubble.  Don’t let the cameras look into the eyes of the terrified civilians or else we would see that they are human beings, just like us.  Don’t show the coffins of  the soldiers.  Don’t budget the war.  Don’t consider what life might be like without this war (better than with the war, perhaps?).  Don’t even think about any metric of success (that would just give the critics something to use).  Don’t state any particular purpose for the war; just call it the endless war on “terrorists.”  Who are “terrorists”?  They are bad people.  Very very very bad people who will do bad things to us for no reason.  They won’t sell us enough oil cheap.  They can’t be trusted with nukes, even though we are the ones, right now, threatening to use nuclear weapons.

By the way, let’s call this upcoming war “Operation SUV” or “Operation Urban Sprawl” for the astounding coincidence that this is yet another conflict with a country rich in oil.  Or let’s call it “Operation Slippery Slope,” because it opens the gates to dropping nuclear bombs on any country that might be developing them.  Actually, the calculus gets a bit fuzzy here:  the Chinese have nuclear bombs and they are sometimes belligerent.  They even call themselves “communists.” But they sell us VCR’s and all that plastic stuff we hand out at little kids’ birthday parties.  Today Iran is about nuclear weapons. Tomorrow, it might or might not be.  Perhaps this should give us pause whenever we substitute name-calling for measured diplomacy.

But back to that silence question. I question our feckless leadership, though I don’t question how we came to have feckless leaders.  

You each know some smart and trustworthy people, right?  Maybe YOU are smart and trustworthy too.  Then ask yourselves this:  would you or any of your smart companions ever consider running for Congress?  All you need is good ideas, right?  Not quite.

You also need lots and lots of money.  It cost almost four billion dollars to run the federal campaigns for 2004.  A senator must raise a million dollars per year to have a chance for reelection.  That’s more than $15,000 per week for six years.

Would you or your friends ever take on this financial burden in order to have a chance to use your great ideas?  Can you imagine holding out your hand and taking huge wads of money–in return for what?  Oh, yeah, “for nothing.” Strings attached?  “No no no no,” they say, but how else could you possibly make it rain that kind of money.  Most people that I trust and respect want no part of such a sleazy enterprise.

Let’s assume that you (and your acquaintances) are independently wealthy.  Money is therefore no problem. You’ll just fund your own campaigns.  No problem then, right?

No problem, unless you want the press digging deeply into every distant corner of your life.  You know where they’ll look? They’ll dig hard ($3.9 B worth of digging) to reconstruct that “experimental” phase you went through in college.  They’ll collect ALL of your passionate posts on the internet. They’ll find out about all of your struggles in high school and your relationship with your parents.  Oh yes, every little intimacy of your marriage will find daylight in every local newspaper.  And you’ll be subjecting your children to the bright lights and the loss of normalcy.  And don’t forget that the next “Swift Boat” crew is right around the corner waiting for you and your loved ones.  You be mocked endlessly by hypocrits that preach that only perfect people or bland people should be elected, when we all know that all people of decent character have regularly suffered though their own mistakes.

My Conclusion

With VERY few exceptions, honest, open-minded and fallible people we desperately need as our future leaders won’t run for Congress.  They wouldn’t run even if we begged them to run and quadrupled Congressional salaries.

Ergo: Almost all of the people now representing us in Congress were severely damaged before running or their moral compasses have now been wiped out by the ubiquitous DC corruption.  

I know that this poost sounds harsh, but you can double-check my conclusion by again noticing the deadly silence in Congress while the president of the US, a man with no game plan, with a lenghthy track record for shallow thinking and with a history of failing at everything he attempts, prepares to fire the first rounds of World War III.

This is truly insane.