Some Thoughts on What's Happening in Washington

or

Nero Continues to Fiddle in the Halls of Congress.

The international economic system is on the verge of collapse. There is serious unrest and instability in many parts of the world. The Balkans. Russia. India and Pakistan. The Congo. Iran and Afghanistan. Iraq. Colombia. Mexico. North Korea. The United Nations is having a difficult time meeting all of its responsibilities around the world, in large part due to the irresponsibility of the Congress failing to pay the back dues that the United States owes.

The Social Security Trust Fund continues to slide toward bankruptcy. Our educational system is not preparing our children to compete in an increasingly technological world. Our campaign finance system can best be described as legalized bribery, with enough loopholes that one can drive a large truck through them. Most of the federal government does not have a budget passed, nearly two weeks into the new fiscal year. Our people are not protected by a Health Care Bill of Rights, despite constant news stories about how they are being hurt and killed by the current system. People continue to be homeless.

So, what issue of overriding importance does the Congress decide that it must spend the major part of its time and energy addressing?

Whether the President of the United States should be impeached for having an affair. Really. If it wasn't so serious, it would be almost laughable. The Congress of the United States is seriously considering whether to impeach the President of the United States, which will totally destabilize this country at a time when the world needs our stability and leadership the more than it has in a half century.

It's a good thing that the Supreme Court has declared the so-called Communications Decency Act unconstitutional. If it hadn't, the House Judiciary Committee and the Office of the Independent Counsel would be in direct violation of that act by posting pornography on the Internet. Talk about hypocrisy!

I'm afraid to add a link to the Starr Report because Geocities has a policy of shutting down sites with links to pornographic sites. Yet this "information" is provided to us by the voyeuristic moralists in Congress.

The whole world is going to hell in a handbasket, to use an old cliché, and Congress wants to impeach the President, destabilizing the one part of the world which until now, has been stable. There are so many more important issues that the Congress should be concentrating on rather than wasting all of this time, energy and money on what should be a private matter between the President and his wife.

The spirit of Nero fiddling while Rome burns is alive and well in the Halls of Congress.

The world economic system is on the verge of collapse, in large part due to the failure of the Congress to invest in the IMF and World Bank to get us through this crisis. This irresponsibility by Congress could very well cause our economy to slide into recession, rather than remaining as the sole major bastion of economic growth in the world. With foreign economies as fragile as they are, a recession in the United States could cause many foreign countries to slide from recession into full economic depression.

Still, Nero continues to fiddle in the Halls of Congress.

The Republicans in Congress get upset because they don't feel that we have the influence we should have in the United Nations, yet they refuse to pay the back dues that we owe. I guess they know that he who pays the fiddler calls the tune, to use another cliché. Perhaps that is why Nero continues to fiddle in the Halls of Congress.

With the obsession with the Lewinsky Affair, Congress is playing right into the hands of our enemies such as Saddam Hussein, and many of the other terrorist leaders throughout the world, who would love nothing better than the United States be immobilized in this time of great international tension and crisis. I would not be surprised if they are not quietly thanking Congress for their voyeuristic obsession and hope that they will keep it up (no pun intended) as long as possible. That just makes things easier for them to plan and eventually carry out actions that will definitely NOT be in our national interest. All because the Republicans had to play power politics in a high stakes game to try to turn out of power the man, despite his faults, that the American people elected to that office.

Under the worst case scenarios, the Social Security Trust Fund will be bankrupt by 2016, yet Congress won't address the problem.