The can’t-do John McQuaid
John McQuaid, some guy selling a useless book, wrote a typical Leftist blame-game finger-pointing opinion piece in the Washington Post this morning that’s right out of Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech. Using the collapsed bridge in Minneapolis as a catalyst for his rant, he claims that the problem with America is Americans in The Can’t-Do Nation;
But the bridge disaster also reflects a broader and more troubling problem. The United States seems to have become the superpower that can’t tie its own shoelaces. America is a nation of vast ingenuity and technological capabilities. Its bridges shouldn’t fall down.
And it’s not just bridges. Has there ever been a period in our history when so many American plans and projects have, literally or figuratively, collapsed? In both grand and humble endeavors, the United States can no longer be relied upon to succeed or even muddle through. We can’t remake the Middle East. We can’t protect one of our own cities from a natural disaster or, it seems, rebuild after one. We can’t rescue our citizens when they’re on TV begging for help. We can’t even give our wounded veterans decent medical care.
Now, I’m no fricken rocket scientist, like McQuaid apparently thinks he is, but to me it seems there’s more blame in the fact that the Federal government has failed, not Americans. Maybe Americans are partially to blame because we swallowed the drivel of Frankie Roosevelt, Lyndie Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Billie Clinton. The more government expands, the less efficient it becomes – which is why the Soviet Union failed for 70 years and North Korea and Cuba…need I go on?
Why does anyone think the Federal bridge guy with an office in Washington, DC knows anything about a bridge he’s never seen? Yeah, he gets reports from other Federal bridge guys, but only the local bridge guys can look at that bridge every week or month – they have to drive over, their families have to drive over it. Doesn’t it make more sense that the local bridge would care more about that bridge than some doofus in Washington? Sure, it shouldn’t be that way, but with thousands of bridges across the country, how can the federal bridge guy track all of them as often as he should?
When the levees in New Orleans broke, there were fingers flying through the air across the country. Everyone blamed the Feds – the Federal levee guys in Washington who had probably never seen the levees in New Orleans – instead of the goofballs who saw the levee every day. When the President told the mayor and governor to evacuate the city, and they didn’t and everyone blamed the President instead of local officials (who were waiting for Greyhound buses to move the lazy criminals in New Orleans who were waiting for the evacuation so they could loot their former-neighbors’ homes).
Why couldn’t the locals blame their local leaders? Because the local leaders didn’t have the deep pockets to hand out $10,000 debit cards. They knew they could count on the Liberal Northeast guilt to pay off big time. They’d seen the Feds pay off the World Trade Center victims, and they wanted their cut.
Now in fairness, McQuaid gives Newt Gingrich a paragraph to blame the feds buried deep within McQuaid’s idiot ramblings – but that’s hardly enough to point out to McQuaid how he is so wrong on so many counts. This country does just fine, it’s just that this neo-liberal system of government has robbed us of our soul. The system is not broke – it’s morally and intellectually bankrupt.
McQuaid holds out hope for the next President to fix the system (which in Leftist gibberish means raise taxes and expand the failing government). It’s not going to be the next President, or the one after that.
We need to change the American culture – instead of demanding that government shoulder more of the burden of our everyday lives, we should have learned lessons that government is useless when it comes to taking care of our neighbors and families and we need to take things away from the government and reclaim it for ourselves, and for our local governments.
Americans have built the world – in less than a century, the world went from the Industrial Age to the Atomic Age. Largely due to American ingenuity – what we lost was the gumption to continue working because of government interference in every aspect of our lives.
Until we take it upon ourselves to elect competent community leaders in place of the slick politicians we’ve been inflicted with lately, we’ll just be throwing more money down a deep dark hole, hoping against hope someone will save us – that someone will never come.
That someone is YOU!
Some bloggers, so steeped in their own victimhood, will never understand that.
