Mating ritual

Do you ever watch those animal shows?  Today's politics reminds me a bit of what I remember seeing once on one of these shows.  It was about two rams head butting each other for mating rights.  It was a struggle over dominance.  Now, I couldn't get a good example of this to show on YouTube on short notice, but this video may give you the idea of the point I am trying to make here.

Both sides in this most recent election seem to be claiming some kind of victory.  To me, it is just more of the same kind of noise that you hear from a couple of rams butting heads.  Someone has to be the winner, but while they are butting heads, a car could come along and kill them all.  They are so engrossed in one another that they lose track of events going on around them.  Animals are said to be "dumb", but people are supposed to be better than that.

Which brings me to Paul Krugman's most recent post.  I've written about him before on this blog.  But when he writes stuff like this, it just makes me see visions of these rams butting heads.  This latest head butting is amongst the left who are trying to puzzle out why they lost the latest head butting contest.  There was actually one quote that I agreed with here:

Mr. Obama’s problem wasn’t lack of focus; it was lack of audacity.

If you get past the head butting of what faction of the Democrats who should be in charge, you get a little nugget of truth there.   I agree there was a lack of audacity.  But it was still pretty audacious what Obama did.  

The amount of spending is not what is at fault.  The thing that is missing here is a vision of how to pull the country out of the mess that it's in.  Indiscriminate spending won't solve anything.  This spending plan of Obama's was plenty audacious enough in the amount.  What it lacked was a clear direction based upon where we are now and where we need to go.  Where are we now?  Too much debt and not enough wealth creation.  You need to create wealth before you can spread it around.  Do the former.  Then you earn the right to the latter.

My idea of a spending plan is to conquer space and reap the rewards of tapping its wealth.    But the Democrats and the Republicans and the factions therein are too busy butting heads with each other to come up with a vision like that.  Hence, what we end up with is a lot of noise.  A lot of grunting and posturing.  But not much results.  But at least the winner gets the spoils afterward.  This gives the term "we're screwed" a whole new perspective.