That’s the actual headline of Eugene Robinson’s column today. I like it. It appears as if he’s feeling the same frustrations as the rest of us — or me, at least.
The nation demands the impossible: quick, painless solutions to long-term, structural problems. While they’re running for office, politicians of both parties encourage this kind of magical thinking. When they get into office, they’re forced to try to explain that things aren’t quite so simple — that restructuring our economy, renewing the nation’s increasingly rickety infrastructure, reforming an unsustainable system of entitlements, redefining America’s position in the world and all the other massive challenges that face the country are going to require years of effort. But the American people don’t want to hear any of this. They want somebody to make it all better. Now.
They want more bubbles. It’s no wonder we’re in this position. Political expedience and short-term gains have helped to inflate the various bubbles we’ve seen over the last 10 or 20 years. And when they exploded, one after another, well, here we are. Of course the other side to this is the heaping piles of misinformation and cons overpowering reality. Actually, I think any independent or Democratic voters who kneejerks over to the Republicans in November ought to be ear-tagged like wildlife so we can track who they are after the Republicans shut down the government and impeach the president in the midst of a sluggish economy.
