I look at our government as an amazing experiment. When
problems come up, I think of ways we can improve it. Dumb Ron Johnson looks at government
and wants to dismantle it, fear it.
That’s the difference in world views between liberals and conservatives. From C-SPAN3:
Raw Story: Tea party-backed Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Thursday told the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference that “restoring faith in government” was the “wrong solution” and that lawmakers should instead be encouraging “distrust.”
Johnson treats us like we're the dumb ones...nice try, but fear wasn't the foundational premise of America:
Johnson said that too many Americans had forgotten the “foundational premise of this nation,” that the Founding Fathers understood government was “something to fear.”
“Americans are willingly trading their freedom and ours for the false sense, for the false promise of economic security,” he opined.
This is Johnson at his dumbest. How many years did
Republicans demand the security of our wealthy "job creators, " offering them “certainty?” Who came up
with the Patriot Act and Homeland Security, and abused it? That was the false promise
of security. If anyone has made the idea of compromise and improving government
hopeless, politicizing everything, it’s Johnson and his “spend like drunken
sailors” Republican pirates.
“So what surprises me is, why does at least a majority continue to elect politicians that are dedicated to growing this place?” he asked. “I have no idea. It utterly baffles me.”
If Johnson did more reading, and do less speechifying, he might have learned that government spending and employment have declined.
Johnson asserted that congressional approval ratings of 9 percent were “too high.”
“When I hear politicians talk about restoring faith in government… no, no, no, no, no. That is the wrong solution! We need to engender that healthy distrust, that healthy distrust that our Founders found with government.”
What a job…make people distrust their own elected representatives and fear their own government.
No wonder I don’t recognize this country anymore, and why
conservative voters feel so backed into a corner.
Another thing dullards like Johnson forget is that the country is, for better or worse, growing. We're way past 300 million now. Arguably too many, given resources, but it's delusional to think we could have a decent, functional society with state and federal governments that are the size they were in, say, the 1920s. It's not just population pressure and the resulting need to have more civil servants maintaining roads, protecting environment and so forth. It's the complexity of the society and its greater tendency towards inefficiency and complex, non-intuitive outcomes -- factors fully put to use by the fat cat culture. It's easier to bamboozle people now, especially if you have lots of cash. Conservatism depends on the very uncertainty it decries in its rhetoric. In short, the message from the likes of Johnson is: Fear the unknown, and we're helping to make more things unknown.
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