Fiddling while Rome Burns

Congress & Media Fiddle While Rome Burns
By Daniel G. Jennings
The United States is facing a series of crises (the healthcare crisis, the energy crisis, the environmental crisis, the budget crisis, and several others I’ve forgotten about) that could culminate in a catastrophe that could rival the Great Depression in magnitude yet our Congress only seems to be interested in political infighting and character assassination.
The Senate is arguing about the filibuster rule and worse nitpicking President Bush’s political appointments the most recent being UN envoy nominee John Bolton. These actions are meaningless political designed to keep Senators from dealing with the nation’s real problems. Take the filibuster rule the Democrats are mad because Republicans want an up and down vote on judges that can’t be blocked by some windbag who wants to strut before the cameras for a few days. Just imagine if all the time, energy, resources and money that the Democrats are going to waste on this filibuster battle were spent on electing more Democratic Senators with an agenda of actually doing something.
The political nominee battles are even worse, there probably isn’t a Republican political nominee that the Democrats can’t find something wrong with. Mr. Bolton is too aggressive for their tastes, so he is a bad diplomat. Of course if Mr. Bolton were agreeable he’d be attacked as too passive.
By placing a microscope on the nominees the Senators can then spend endless hours holding hearings and investigating the nominees. This leads to political battles and plenty of media attention so Senators can get plenty of TV interviews.
In the house the battle is more troublesome Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay is under attack for ethics violations. Now, I imagine these violations are real but are they any worse than what a hundred other Congressmen are doing? No.
So why is DeLay being investigated? Simple it gives Democrats something to do they can attack the evil conservative from Texas and score brownie points with the New York media. Republicans can then run to their embattled leader’s defense. This creates a political battle of good vs evil that gives Congressmen something to do besides deal with the nation’s problems.
This situation is made worse by the self-proclaimed news media which ignores the nation’s problems while devoting endless amounts of attention to the political squabbles. The media personalities in New York and Washington don’t have to leave their comfortable studios and their coffee cups. Nor do they have to risk offending the big corporations that pay their bills by reporting on something potentially controversial.
The hypocrisy of this situation becomes all the more apparent when the public ignores the shoddy political circus and average people start crabbing that nothing is being done. Instead of taking real action the elitists condemn average people as ignorant oafs who aren’t interested in public affairs. Why should average people be interested in politics that are about as real and have as much bearing on their lives as an episode of American Idol? At least American Idol is entertaining the sorry show from Washington these days lacks even that quality.
The frightening thing about this wave of do nothingism disguised as political squabbling has a precedent in American history. Today’s politics resemble those of the 1850s when Congress and the political leadership discussed and debated everything but the major problem facing the nation: slavery and its unholy stepchild succession. Congress spent all its time debating the issue of expanding slavery west, a non issue since most Western states were settled by anti slavery northerners. Such measures as the Homestead Act, the Transcontinental Railroad and the creation of new political divisions were shelved while Congress did nothing. Nor was this tomfoolery confined to Capitol Hill, things at the White House were just as bad. President James Buchanan’s answer to this crisis was to ignore secessionism and send the army to Utah to deal with the moral threat posed by Mormon polygamy just as today’s politicians ignore the energy crisis while talking about the menace of homosexuality. Buchanan didn’t use the military against the successionists or try and negotiate a deal between the slave holders and their enemy to preserve the peace.
Finally, average Americans sick and tired of the do nothingism elected a president who tried to do something, Abraham Lincoln. They did this by rejecting the two established political parties Whigs and Democrats and supporting a new party called the Republicans. The result was the Civil War that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and nearly destroyed the country.
The moral of the lesson is clear those who fiddle while Rome burns are just as likely to perish in the inferno they unleashed as the average people they dismiss as ingrates. The question we have to ask ourselves is have our leaders learned this lesson or not. Judging by the content of the average Sunday morning news show I’d say not.