Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> I never get this. When people are elected to office it's like
> they're hired to do a job. If they don't do the job they open
> themselves for criticism.
And they are doing the job they were hired to do. They are looking for ways to maintain public order. They are protecting the insurance industry. They are protecting the pharmaceutical industry. They are carrying on as best they can the function of discipling nations that fail to do their part in creating an atmosphere friendly to world business. That involves killing quite a few people, who are not visibly doing harm, so that involves creating various enemies who may be dangerous and who are served by these people that they are killing.
And in the midst of performing these onerous tasks, they have the task of contiually reassuring 300 million people that they are in safe hands in this dangerous world. On the whole, they do a pretty good job of these taks. Carpers can set up unreal criteria for what winning a war means in material terms, and on the basis of those criteria pretend that Bush failed to carry out the mission he set himself in Iraq. Doubtless trouble will arise again there, but that will be a new crisis. This is, remember, a dangerous world and we can't expect final victory.
So I don't get your complaint.
Socialism or barbarism. We have the latter. We have had it for a century. And yet people keep thinking that somehow the people up there ought to make that barbarism more comfortable for us. And when they fail to do so we whine and call them tools and scumbags, and claim they are not doing their job. But they are.
Carrol