Madness in D.C. – Threat of Government Shutdown is a Sign of Our Dysfunction

The specter of a shutdown of the federal government because of the idiocy (and that really is the only word to describe them) of the present Republican majority in the House of Representatives brings to mind the statement by a former governor of South Carolina when he heard of the vote by his fellow South Carolinians to secede from the Union shortly after Abraham Lincoln was elected President:.

“South Carolina is too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

When we listen to the lunatic ramblings of people like Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee Chairman, or Ron Paul, the Texas Congressman who heads the House Committee on Monetary Policy (and who advocates that we return to the gold standard), it truly makes us realize that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Indeed, not since the Civil War has America been entwined amidst such unremitting hostility between red and blue states.

Our problems today are all self made. We have nobody to blame but ourselves. We preach democracy to the rest of the world, yet our system is broken. We preach the benefits of capitalism, yet the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than poorest 150 million (that’s right, million) Americans, about half the country. The great American middle class has seen its share of the American Pie shrink to an even smaller piece for the past 30 years.

It is a farce to say that we are a land of equality and opportunity for all. The pathetic thing is this: Unlike in the 1930s, when average people were smart enough to understand that government was the only means by which the Wall Street robber barons could be brought under control, the typical American  today seems to vote on the side of those who are out to make the rich even richer and the typical American poorer.

Studies have shown that watching too much TV can have adverse effects on the brains of children. Perhaps the Boob Tube is to blame and decades of TV watching have indeed decayed our brains. Or maybe not, but whatever the cause, we certainly are a Stupid Nation in 2011.