Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright appropriately described the world "a mess" when you consider the situations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Gaza, Syria, Russia and Ukraine. They are all rife with some sort of military conflict, and U.S. diplomatic efforts to improve the situations appear to be ineffective.
We are not the world's police, but we are supposed to use our military, economic and diplomatic resources to protect our U.S. interests, provide for our security, support our allies and provide humanitarian assistance where and when feasible. That's who we are as a nation.
But frequent and fragmented news reports do not convey a sense of assurance that we are achieving these objectives, nor that the resources are being used effectively. As citizens, we have to depend upon the judgment and decisions of those elected to fulfill these responsibilities, since they have access to all of the facts and supposedly they have strategies in place to effect the right results.
Our collective confidence that these elected "leaders" are doing an effective job is very low. As a result, we suffer from "bad news anxiety". Last Friday, one caller expressed his frustration by saying his head was about to explode trying to grasp this world mess, and asked what could he do. I responded that he should take two aspirins and don't watch any news over the weekend, and tune back in to The Herman Cain Show on Monday.
On a serious note, I told him that there is nothing individual citizens can do in the near term about foreign relations except to trust those elected to handle their responsibilities, and that trust level is low. Longer term, we must replace them, starting with control of the U.S. Senate in November 2014, and a new president and administration in 2016.
Recent surveys have confirmed that this low level of trust in the president, his administration and Senate Democrats is also applicable to domestic affairs, because the U.S. is also a mess. Just consider our anemic economic growth, unemployment, declining incomes, rising prices, and the implosion of ObamaCare on top of corruption, cover-ups, waste, fraud and abuse of power in our federal government.
The more we learn, the more we see that not much is being done to solve anything. This is especially true of the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border. Once again the Senate and President Obama would not even consider the bill passed by the House to take some steps in the right direction, because the bill did not provide amnesty or approve as much money as Democrats want to spend.
So the president and Senate Democrats just left town for vacation, leaving border patrol agents and local communities in the middle of another mess. Democrats also know that agents and local leaders have too much human compassion to not at least try to deal with a situation they did not create using inadequate resources, while the related stories dominate the media.
This is exactly what the president and the Democrats want in order to minimize stories about our anemic economic growth, unemployment, declining incomes, rising prices and the implosion of ObamaCare on top of corruption, cover-ups, waste, fraud and abuse of power in our federal government.
As we have said before, we will continue to tell you the truth and give you the facts about the issues that the Democrats and the mainstream media would rather not talk about. Much of it will still be bad news, but it will be what you need to know and not what they want you to know.
Bad news anxiety can't be totally cured while the world and the nation are a mess. But we can ease the pain with the truth as we approach the November elections without our heads exploding!
We must know the truth and be in our right minds when we vote!
