More Lipstick, Please....

 

 

"The lipstick may not be working - how about some rouge?"

One of my recent fantasies is to give the State of the Union address. No, I would not color it with untruths. Instead, I would tell the truth. Let the folks know exactly how things are going. There probably would not be too many applause lines. In fact, once it was over, many would be running for the House bathrooms to vomit. Sometimes the truth just hurts.

For example, if we had a truth teller for a President, he would start out by saying "The State of the Union is NOT good, and I will now tell you why:"

• Debt - How is that going anyhow? Terrible. The President has told us it is going down. Wrong. The deficit is not growing as fast. However the debt is still going up. It is like being on a diet and still gaining weight - only not as fast. Still is estimated to be between $18T and $20T by the time Obama leaves office. There is no plan, I repeat, no plan in place to reduce our debt. This continues to be a cancer on our economy that will end up being our financial undoing.
• Terror - We have a new leader in Al Qaeda now who is promising mayhem in the West. In addition, we have splinter terror groups who could turn the Sochi Games into another Munich, or worse. We may not be able to track terror groups very well, but we sure can collect gobs of stuff about our own citizens. What would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, is now evolving into the norm.
• Health Care - We have now seen what happens when kids take a watch apart and don't have a clue in how to put it back together again. ObamaCare has been nothing but a slow motion train wreck and it will only get worse once the employer mandate kicks in. If truth was in session, the motto would be "less for more" rather than the promised "more for less". Even the "low information crowd" is not that stupid.
• Economy - This one has been way, way too hard for the kids driving the car to fix. The only cure has been to unleash the unholy power of the Fed to print more money than there is paper. Net result - phony gains on Wall Street and 92+ million out of the job market. U6 unemployment stuck at 13 to 14%. Most jobs created are part time and lower pay. It is so hard to fix, the Jobs Council rarely meets anymore. Just ignore the problem and it might go away - or leave it more the next guy.
• Food - The number of people who need food assistance of some kind keeps going up like a rocket. When ever someone asks "why", they are accused of wanting to starve kids and throw grandma off the bus. The problem is simply this - if this trend continues, soon half the people who live in the country which produces most of the world's food, will be on food assistance. Somehow the lap dog media does not seem to care what the root cause is. I do.
• Military - As Russia and China once again start to feel their oats and become more of a blue water threat, our military continues to shrink and become more marginalized. Why is that? I think Mr. Gates might have hit the nail on the head in his recent book.

So what is the State of our State? We are in trouble. I mean deep trouble. We need visionary leadership. Wise leaders of courage. We tried the rookies - didn't work well. Can't get enough lipstick to make a dent.