Like everyone else I get up each day and do my best to make sense of my life. I turn on “Fox and Friends” while I pour a cup of my morning coffee. I give a quick read to The Wall Street Journal’s editorials and scan the news until later in the day when I devote more time to its content. I spend about an hour at the beginning of each day, reading and responding to those emails I have not deleted as fraudulent schemes or matters of no interest.
I “surf” the news and opinion sites to which I contribute and move on to The Drudge Report, a news aggregator that has an influence on the day’s issues comparable to Rush Limbaugh. The news is invariably bad whether it is about the nation’s imperiled economy, the gridlock in Congress, or events around the world. As an old journalist I understand well that bad news sells and good news is relegated to the “lifestyle” or “entertainment” sections of the newspaper or news sites.
Rush caught a lot of heat recently when he said he was “ashamed” of America, but I think a lot of us are ashamed of a nation being run by people of low-to-no character that we elected to office. We are ashamed of ourselves for being duped by some Republicans who are more closely aligned with Democrats, of a Republican Party that seems hapless and unable to unite around its values with a strong message of fiscal prudence, strong defense, and a host of other issues upon which we generally agree.
The United States used to feel like a rational place where, even when we had differences, they would be negotiated, compromises would be made, and our general welfare would be the guiding principle. We used to have cause to believe that the Constitution would determine our governance, but after four years without a budget and government still funded by “continuing resolutions”, there is cause to believe otherwise.