Vic Socotra

16 October 2008

Spreading it Around

The Celebrated Galloway Manure Spreader, Patent Pending

Dodgers vs Phillies, or Obama vs McCain.

I tried both, being a civic-spirited type. As is true with all compromises, didn’t do well at either.

The Dodgers had to win- for them there was no tomorrow, but in the end it did not matter. I wrapped the game around the debate, sort of like a burrito. There was20not a great deal of meat to it, but I didn’t expect it.

I was not surprised that the matter of Senator Obama’s citizenship did not come up. That is too strange; the controversy about the Birth Certificate will be resolved in court up in Philadelphia, or not, since that is where the legal matter resides, and I will accept the verdict when it is issued, or thrown out for lack of merit.

The citizenship issue does not stop there, however, since no one disputes the fact that the Senator was registered for school in Djakarta as the adopted son of an Indonesia national, a country that did not have provisions for dual citizenship at the time.

The Senator's Mother was a free spirit- I knew a lot of people like her, back in the day, as you did, too. A lot of us had a hearty contempt for the laws of the State, and it was well earned.

I would not be surprised to learn that she considered that she was just doing what she had to do to get her son in the best school possible. She probably considered the words on paper to be- well, just words. I doubt whether she had any intention of renouncing her citizenship, or that of her young son. There was a lot of fibbing going around at the time.

There is more about that particular document that freaks people out. I don't particularly care under what faith he was registered- although that, too, has been handled in a disingenuous manner. In fact, disingenuous is the best way I could characterize the whole mess of this campaign.

The debate last night just reinforced my repugnance for both the candidates. The "Joe the Plumber" thing came up more than two dozen times. It was intended to be as compelling as the Thelma and Louise- no, wait, Harry and Louise- the first two couldn't have been a couple since the laws didn't permit it at the time- campaign that sunk Hillary's attempt at health care reform.

I don't know what the answer to that particular mess is. I can't afford the company policy and stuck with the military TriCare system that came with my retirement from the Navy.

Get ready, my friends, since what we are going to wind up with is something like it, the original socialized medicine. Care is provided, as available, which is the only way that a universal scheme can go.

It is like Britain's, and it is fair enough, since it meters the treatment available to those who can live long enough to wait. There will be a shadow system that emerges to provide custom care for those who can pay for it, which of course will have to be quashed ruthlessly. Then it will migrate to Bangkok or someplace where Washington cannot get its hands on it.

I think Kurt Vonnegut had something to say about the race to universal fairness, but I can't remember what it is.

Senator Obama summed his philosophy up pretty well in the now-celebrated exchange with Joe-from-Ohio.

Joe Wurzelbacher is a real guy who expressed exactly my distrust of the glib young man from Illinois. They had a six-minute conversation during the campaign as it rolled over the Buckeye State and lit, for an instant, in the fair city of Holland. Those minutes were a lifetime in the world of the sound byte. The exchange was as revealing as Senator Obama's cool and detached assessment in San Francisco of the middle Americans who cling to guns and religion in the face of an uncertain future.

"Do you believe in the American dream?" Wurzelbacher asked the Senator.

"Yes, sir," was the response, the only one possible, and I think it was true. I mean, where else can a single mom put her children through Harvard Law School, pay for round the world trips, and enable them to live well in an expensive town on community organizer wages?

Is this a great country, or what? It is a positive American hallucination. Joe works for a living, and he is suspicious about how things like that happen.

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" asked the plumber.

"It's not that I want to punish your success," replied Obama, who did not deny the implicit truth contained in the question. "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success too. My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. . . . I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

The only way to do that is to have somebody operate the spreader, and it is clear about who that is going to be.

It is no t that I trust Senator McCain. I just have a better record on which to judge the nature and likely direction of his prevarications.

I do not want to pay more taxes. The contention that they are to go up, and go up steeply, under President Obama is nonsense. The Social Security cap on wages will go first; he has already said so. The Bush tax cuts expire in FY-11 without doing a thing. Then the inflationary consequences of throwing trillions of dollars around will kick in, and remembering the last time the smart guys tried to spend their way out of trouble, we will be in for decades of containment.

The effects of inflation will be to steal the pensions and savings of the old, and devalue the social fabric that ties us together.

I will be old for this adventure, and a little tired. That is one of the reasons I take it so personally.

I understand where Joe was coming from. The American Dream was carved up by the smart guys who took FDR's belief in the intrinsic good of home ownership, and parlayed it into the bogus derivatives that mortgaged not just our homes, but our future.

Both parties and all administrations have been complicit. The sanctimony from those who permitted it- ranking members and chairmen alike, since all them have been both- is manure.

You get what you pay for in politics, and sometimes more. We will now elect the Spreader in Chief. He will be fair. He promised.

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