With the jawbone of an ass!

We suppose that we are having just about as hard a time getting past Mitt Romney’s now amended comments on the forty seven percent as gifts, as he is getting over his election loss! We cannot for the life of us understand how people can come to the conclusions that they come to given the evidence that they are presented with.

It is quite evident now that Mitt Romney is simply a person who will say just about anything that he feels needs saying just to get the results that he wants to achieve. The question persists with his comments this week that president Obama gave “enormous gifts� to groups like women voters, the young, and the black and Latino electorate simply to secure election to his second term that just what was he trying to accomplish saying these things other than to chew on some very sour grapes. Perhaps the man was simply not capable of thinking that he could actually lose this election. There are egos that large in this world. Just look at Donald Trump!

Getting past the ego issue, however, still leaves the comments that he made to large donors both last may with the forty seven percent and this week with the gifts comment leaving both intact. There must be something more to this than what we have seen. We remember back in the nineteen sixties when the great society came into being with Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. Johnson felt that he had gotten a mandate to create this better world for all of our citizens no matter how far down the latter from perceived success that they might be. Other people thought that some of the things that the social programs created by Johnson and his victorious Democratic party were, indeed, creating a dependency state. We can remember in our teen years seeing grown men taking turns using a single hoe or shovel to clean out the weeds and accumulations from the sidewalks leading from the Johnson County courthouse out to the street! The program was called “Green Thumb!“ There were some who saw this and simply looked in disbelieve as they saw what they thought was make belief work going on. But, at least it was an attempt at work for a class of people who either did not want to work or could not for various reasons hold a job. Some thought that it was an attempt by the Johnson administration to recreate the old Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the nineteen thirties. Although we cannot remember much that the Green Thumb titled programs did of lasting significance, unlike the CCC before them whose works still dot the land, their efforts still live on in the annals of many minds who have now aged into what might be called the generation that includes angry old white men.

This idea of buying votes by use of government programs and handouts is not new! We do not think that Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to buy votes when he came up with programs such as the CCC. What he was doing was trying to save and revive a nation and its economy that had gone astray. The people who worked in the many CCC programs were proud of what they did and many of the very aged are still willing to take you places where their efforts can still be seen. What Roosevelt did made he and his party many friends, and, they formed a coalition that allowed his type of governance to go on in this nation for several decades thereafter. What so many forget is the fact that CCC participants also fought and helped win the Second World War.

Mitt Romney cannot remember the nineteen thirties since he was born in 1947, but, he can possibly remember what has gone on since that time. It is questionable if he has ever seen anything like a Green Thumb great society program in action from his lofty and now apparently self evidently detached economic perch. Remember that this man even did his required Mormon two year evangelical outreach mission over in France, so his chances at actually seeing what average American have gone through up close and personal have been limited and passed on in most instances. We often thought during this last campaign that it would have done Romney and the Republicans a world of good if he had taken a day a week and done some work of the type one sees in the series “Dirty Jobs�.

We bring up past experiences because they are predictors of the formation of future opinions and thought. Romney obviously gets his through a filter of anecdotal evidence among other things. Mitt Romney has apparently gotten his ideas of “gifts� and vote buying from the same sources that he himself has become. By perpetuating the ideas just mentioned he is educating another generation of people like himself to believe just as he has come to believe. It is very apparent that these people live in a world far different from the average person and that they have little desire to really discover what goes on in the world just outside of the isolated bubble in which they exist. What is even more disturbing is the fact that they are raising a future generation that believes not only that votes can be bought by favors, but, that they themselves are entitled to these same favors in the form of estate tax relief, special tax considerations in a Byzantine tax code, and forms of corporate welfare that currently are proliferating across this nation and even this world. To be blunt, it is alright for them to receive special consideration and coddling because of who they are and from whose loins they have sprung! They have no realization that there are people out there in this world who have simply been left behind by their inability to cope with modern society and its economy that puts premiums on things such as the word “efficiency� that seems to always translate out into more and more lost employment as more and more excess profits are built on the backs of it. There was a small segment of the population who could not do anything more than Green Thumb jobs back in the nineteen sixties. The efficiencies and the complications of this modern world have increased that number many fold until it has become a supposed burden on people like Mitt Romney’s social and economic class. To put it bluntly, it cuts into their profit margin and they don’t like that one little bit! They know that the deficits cannot go on forever but they are very reluctant to shoulder their part of the load, instead preferring to cut entitlements to those that have literally nothing else between themselves and real starvation.

The real questions that probably should be raised by Romney’s mention of the forty seven percent who are takers instead of makers and takers of “gifts� are why did we allow ourselves to get to this situation and what should we do about it. No matter what we do, we feel as if this nation should have an obligation to give those whom we have brought into this world, partially due to the idea that there should not be any population limiters such as abortion and contraception, some basic form of a decent life. These people have never wanted anything more than a roof over their heads and some food for their belly’s and some half way decent medical care. There will always be that segment that will game the system but the tide of those who are cast into desperate circumstances due to no fault of their own and events beyond their control appears to be ever increasing. How many college students now graduating cannot find a decent job? Is that their fault? After all, they bought into a system that has failed them completely and has cast this nation into a period of questioning and self doubt that it has not seen since the great depression. If people like this new well educated under class cannot make the grade, how can all of those others with no advantages at all have any chance to survive in the new world that the Romney class would cast us into?

And, it has been people like Mitt Romney who have created these situations all across this nation and this multi-national corporate world! By their collective actions and their collective greed, it is the Romney class who have caused an almost myth to become an actual reality for more and more people cast aside by the Bain Capital world that they have created in their haste to acquire more and more and more as they share it with fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer! It has been said in the past that there is a “creative destruction� that goes on in the American economic system. And, the bodies and broken dreams from it are strewn about far and wide. And, just perhaps, metaphorically, they were done so with the jawbone of an ass. And people like Mitt Romney are most definitely that ass. And they unabashedly show it to us more and more with each and every passing day! It is a perversion of the tale of Samson in the book of Judges in the Christian Bible’s old testament, where he took the new jawbone of a donkey and slew a thousand men. It is so apparent that the very wealthy took the talking jawbone of this ass Romney and attempted to slew a very basic way of life that they do not even make any attempt to have any empathy with nor understand. Do not misunderstand us! We do not hate the rich. We just wish they would do more to help hold the social compact together that has so benefited this nation in the past. We really cannot make this work without them! And, we are reminded of the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah. Delilah found the source of Samson’s great strength and cut off his hair as he slept. He was powerless for a time and was even rendered blind. But his hair grew quietly back and his strength returned. One day he found the pillars of the great temple of the powerful and pulled it down around all of them. It is a lesson that we could all benefit from!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.