No taste

Decades ago, I used to watch syndicated “Star Trek” episodes in the afternoon after school (I’m no “trekkie” – don’t get that idea), but one episode in particular always stuck with me. Since I’m no fan, I can’t tell you the number or title of it, just the gist of the story.

Some lonely guy on some distant planet had been observing Earth for years and copied the culture and behavior from he saw through his telescope. Well, anyway, he somehow lured Kirk and Company to his planet and captured them. To entice them to stay, he laid out a sumptuous banquet of meats and vegetables he had manufactured from what he observed of earth.

Well, when the crew sat down and started to enjoy the meal, they were shocked to find that the food had no taste because their captor/host had copied what he’d seen, but because of the distance, was unable to replicate the taste or smell of the food. The Democrat candidates remind me of that fellow.

John Edwards wants to learn about poverty, so he wrangles and advisory job with a hedge fund company. Most people, if they wanted to learn about life in poverty, would work at a soup kitchen, or a battered women’s shelter, but John Edwards can’t get too close to the poor to get a taste of the life, so he observes poverty from a 80-story corner office.

Hillary Clinton wants to “strengthen the middle class” according to her website. How? By making healthcare affordable, lowering energy costs, protecting homeowners from foreclosures, making college affordable and raising the minimum wage. Are those even attainable goals, or are they just window dressing?

How do you force healthcare to be more affordable than it already is – especially when most of the workers with no healthcare don’t see a value in investing in their own well-being and don’t pay the employer-supplemented premiums?

How do you make energy costs lower without people conserving energy and without making the necessary commitment to tapping our own energy resources, wile China helps Cuba tap resources available to us?

How do you protect homeowners who don’t pay their mortgages from foreclosures? Why does everyone need to go to college and why does raising the minimum wage for a tiny percentage of workers improve everyone’s condition?

She’s never been middleclass. Since we’re close to the same age, I can say with some authority that middle class kids didn’t get to go to East Coast Ivy League Schools like Hillary. We went to Community colleges and public schools if we were lucky – or we joined the military. She’s not one of us, no matter how hard she tries to prove otherwise. 

Generally, these are just BS statements meant to make Clinton look like she really cares about the middleclass – plenty of good looking red meat, with no taste.

And then there’s Barack Obama. Since he’s made a career out of being Black, how Black is he really? Aside from the obvious problem that his mother is white and his father is actually African, the fact that he was mainly raised outside of the United States and went to law school, what could he possibly have in common with an American Black person raised in the innercity? Again, it’s just his appearance, not his substance that we’re supposed to see.

I can already anticipate my email – Republicans candidates aren’t middleclass either. Well, right, they’re not. But then aren’t trying to pass themselves off as middleclass, are they?

Remember the 1992 campaign when Bill Clinton promised a middleclass tax cut? Remember the outcome of that? He came on TV and told us that he’d worked harder than he’d ever worked in his life, but, sorry, he just couldn’t find us a middleclass tax cut – so instead he was raising our taxes more than they’d ever been raised before. He raised taxes on working families, on retirees and he made it all retroactive so that even people who’d been dead had their taxes raised.

All appearance, no taste.

Category: Politics