Great LTE from The Nothing

MARTIN KIMELDORF; Tumwater | • Published October 19, 2010

I yearned to channel my anger at the status quo by becoming a card-carrying conservative, but my memory made me ineligible, even for tea party supporters.

For instance, Dino Rossi and company cry crocodile tears over the stimulus spending but they fail to recall the larger Reagan-Bush deficits.

Tea partyers send me a postcard stating: “If you can find a product or service in the Yellow Pages, see if the private sector can do the job at lower cost and higher efficiency than the government.” Stupidly I ask, “Don’t you remember how Enron raised the cost of energy rather than lower it?” They smirk. I reply, “And what about escalating health care costs kept artificially high by drug makers, insurance banditos, and big medicine?” “Government regulations strangle business and force prices upwards,” they chanted in unison. Hmmm, I wondered out loud, “Didn’t the BP debacle result from not enough oversight by the government?” Sadly, I remember too much, like when Boeing tried to charge our government $500 for a hammer.

Sucking on their tea bags, they hissed, “You’re a damn socialist.” I stammered, “I wasn’t the one handing out big checks to the greedy bankers who were too big to fail.” In fact, I suggest we outlaw casino capitalism (futures, puts and calls, hedge funds) and make it a strictly investment institution, to avoid the next meltdown.

If we don’t remember the lessons, then we make the same mistakes, and vote in the conservatives.

Their success pivots around our amnesia.
Read more: http://www.theolympian.com/2010/10/19/1408423/must-not-make-same-mistakes.html#ixzz12uvy2a4d