2010-06-25

Here's the Thing...

I am an avid reader of James Taranto's "The Best of the Web Today," on the Wall Street Journal's website. In fact, it is safe to say that I would probably not read the WSJ were it not for Taranto's column. To be funny, eloquent, and insightful almost all the time is something to which we should all aspire. I get a lot of enjoyment and even a little inspiration from this column.

Anyway, today in an item about Chris Dodd and the so called "financial reform," Taranto presents us with the following observation:

"No one will know until this is actually in place how it works." Echoes of Nancy Pelosi on ObamaCare: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
Well, the world is filled with uncertainty. No one knows what might happen tomorrow. But that's just a fact of life. The people who run Congress seem to have mistaken it for a principle of government.

There is plenty to say about this, and Taranto says most of it. But I want to make an observation of something that haunts me about Congress and the President these days...

Those currently in office generally range from age 30-something to age 70-something. (Yes, I am aware of the outliers...) What this means is that they are most certainly not the same people as the current generation of hard-partying, drugged-out, vapid youth by whom we are absolutely accosted every day in the media and in shopping malls everywhere.

No, the people in politics today grew up decades ago. In those philosophically empty decades of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond, the current crop of political losers cut their teeth and learned everything they know. Which, as we can tell from Dodd's quote above, is basically nothing.

But they raised the current crop of children. What happens when these vapid youth ascend to the chambers of government?

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