I Heard the Man Saying Something...

The Captains tell:  They pay you well.
and they say, they need sailing men
to show the way (and leave today...)

Was it you that said,"How Long?"
"How long ... to the point of no return?"


First off, on recent campaign coverage:
I loved Clint Eastwood's performance.
Hit his mark.  Very real, very funny, very honest.

The politicians can't do that, by the nature of the game.
Striving to be so non-offensive, they lose at the honesty game.
There's a reason the Capitol players in the Hunger Games were depicted as behaving so ... artificially, I think.  Eastwood gave us Real Life.  He remembered the unemployed.  He said what so many out here are thinking...

President Obama isn't getting the job done. Period.
I chuckled a bit recently when I read a liberal writer pick up on the feminist line:  "In order for a woman to succeed in a man's world, she has to be twice as good.  Fortunately, that is not difficult."

He was making the case that President Obama -- a black man in a white man's world -- has to be twice as good at his job to gain public acceptance.   But who believes, honestly, that the president's performance is even up to par?

Voters were promised a man of compromise who had what it takes to bring folks together, to bridge differences, to transcend a simplistic black-and-white worldview to move forward together and tackle the admittedly difficult economic and military challenges to the country...

In reality?  The political world is much different than moving forward by bringing together black and white, conservative and liberal students on the Harvard Law Review.  The performance standard is much different than the job evaluation given to work performed under community grants.

Some of us suspected the junior senator wasn't ready.  Those "present" votes, plus the lack of a track record -- just the "potential" -- didn't promise much, if you were operating and evaluating in reality.

Still, people bring their own guilt and baggage to the voting booth, and he got the campaigning job done all right.  He won.  Wasn't that the task at hand afterall, we were reminded.  Simply ... brilliant.

But then, reality set in.  The Clintons knew what the new president would be up against, even with a Democrat-majority Congress.  Perhaps they would have been ready to operate under such reality from day one.

President Obama was not ready.  His team of economic advisers and political gurus also "won" in that they too secured more lucrative positions and relished the political gamesmanship.  But they forgot about the team.

They cut the working class from the party. They courted celebrities.  They enjoyed the spoils of their victory.  Meanwhile, the gasoline prices that fuel so much of the domestic economic engine sucked up more and more of personal budgets.  It didn't pay to save, with paltry interest rates, but who wants to spend on a rainy day today when there are darker storms on the horizon looming ever close to view?

If it took Clint Eastwood and the empty-chair routine to acknowledge these realities, so be it.  He's an artist, and art is underrated in representing reality.  Especially government-funded art.

He hit his mark last night.  Thanks again, Clint.
For showing up, and getting the job done.