by Robert Mckenna

Created on: November 17, 2010   Last Updated: November 18, 2010

What athlete in the world would compete against a powerful opponent without any chance of winning, and pay for the privilege; pay exorbitantly with every dollar he has currently, and borrows against every dollar he or she will ever make, even every dollar their children will ever make? 

For illustration, the athletic event is boxing.  The athlete is a powerful person with a long list of decisive wins and only two losses in his young career.  The other fighter is small and without a proper trainer, so international rules were created and imposed to make the fight fair; the large fighter must wear a blindfold, have his/her hands tied together, and can use only the center of the ring, or face international sanctions.  No rules apply to the smaller fighter.

Emotions would have to run very high to coerce the larger fighter to enter such a one-sided contest at such an excessive cost.  Knocking down the World Trade Center and killing thousands of people, changing everything to the core of the American Way of Life, and threaten to continue to do harm, certainly sufficed to raise the emotional level, and the fight happens.   

Ten years later, in the worst economic times the United States has faced since the Great Depression, the US has spent according to the Pentagon $620 Billion Dollars in Iraq and $190 Billion Dollars in Afghanistan.  Those amounts really only represent the contractual price for a trainer, a new uniform, and gloves for the US fighter.  However, after ten years of battle, the Pentagon has left out all the ancillary trials and tribulations of the fighter and the family, as well as the country as a whole, putting the cost more realistically at over Three Trillion Dollars just for the Iraq War, according to an article in the Washington Post.

A recent election held in the United States showed a single major concern on the minds of all Americans.  Americans want spending under control, and not one politician gave anything other than lip service to ending the most expensive and least effective wars in American history.  Not one politician suggested Americans get used to the fact that because of a governmental paranoid fear of Muslim terrorists, and our current policies in the Muslim World, our freedoms will be forever outdated and soon just a legend or fairy tale like Camelot.  When you go to the airport, you can now count on sexual violation by TSA, to keep you safe.  Probably films of your naked body as you go through the screening machine will be on sale on some Internet voyeur site the same day.  The government has complete legal permission to violate your Constitutional Rights as a citizen, for no reason, just suspicion, which may or may not be based on how you dress or how you look according to some government flunky on a power trip that could not get a real job in the private sector.  How could that be, you must be mistaken, by the way what is in the Patriot Act?

If politicians wanted a balanced budget, the country would have a balanced budget.  Here is the rub, if the politicians balance the budget all the wonderful favors promised special (powerful) interests, will not be fulfilled and then the politician will not be reelected.  Politics is taking lying, cheating, and stealing, to an art form.  Less mindless talk, name-calling, and blaming the other party, followed by substantive legislation, correcting generations of abominable behavior by both parties would be a refreshing start to a new Congress.  However, history repeats itself.  It will be politics as usual.   

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