Bugity, Bugity, Bugity

I am gonna rant here for a second folks. Fasten your seatbelts. I have just come back from a four day weekend were I was once again working on a copious number of projects around the house. Working in the Arizona heat means I have to take a lot of breaks so that I don’t get dehydrated. I have to plop myself down in front of the television for about 30 minutes after every hour of outside labor to stretch out and cool off while drinking something cold.

While doing so this past weekend, I got to see the above mentioned clip at least 5 times. Every single news outlet seemed to think that this was the cutest and most funny piece of news on the planet for some reason.

A little bit of background here; I don’t like NASCAR. I have always been a Formula 1 fan. Driving as fast as you can in a circle for two hours has never been my idea of a fun thing to watch. Secondly, I am not a big fan of organized religion. You can worship anyway you want, but keep it in your church, your living room or your basement.

This video just hammered home how stupid the American media thinks we are, if this is something that passes for news and entertainment. There are debt ceiling talks, mass murder in Norway, train wrecks in China and famine in Somalia, and we get to watch a fat Baptist preacher talk about his ‘smokin hot wife’ at a NASCAR invocation.

Is it just me, or am I the only one that would find it odd for Jesus to bless an event that basically puts people’s lives at risk for the sake of winning a trophy? Wouldn’t that be like Christ pumping up the crowd before the Chariot Race in Ben-Hur?

Is it any wonder that the rest of the world thinks we are really f*cked up?

Then there is this whole debt ceiling debate in Washington, or as I like to call it, “So You Think You Can Vote – the D.C. Edition”. Because that is what it has come down to, a reality television show where everyone tunes into to see who gets the final rose or gets booted off the island.

The Republican right is trying to make a stand on this Tea Party movement for no new taxes. In so doing they appear to be willing to shut down the government and cripple the nations credit rating all to make the President look bad and be more ‘defeatable’ in the future.

Having worked in government for the past 15 years, I know how mismanaged it can be. The words government and efficiency cannot be used in the same sentence. So the Republicans seems to think that we can ‘lean out’ the system and make it run more efficiently by not raising taxes and giving tax breaks to create more jobs and ergo, generate more governmental revenue.

It doesn’t work that way. I don’t like higher taxes anymore than the next guy, but if I want things to work, I know that someone has to pay for the fireman, the policeman, the ambulance driver and the old folk’s social security. The economic landscape has changed folks, and cutting taxes to create more jobs in the future isn’t going to happen. Welcome to socialism. Don’t blame Obama, blame the past leaders both Democrat and Republican going back to Nixon. They led us down this path.

So stop scaring the old people and jockeying for the best time slot on network television to slander the opposition. Do it like the old days. Go behind closed doors, make a deal, come out smiling, say everything is going to be fine and let us get on with our lives. We know things won’t get better, they rarely do in government, just don’t make it into a reality sporting event.

That is all, you may now unfasten your seatbelts and move about the cabin.