Monday, October 18, 2010

Comment on AP - Yahoo! News:
A productive Congress gets no respect from voters

A productive Congress gets no respect from voters - Yahoo! News

This deserves to be preserved for when Journalism School students show up at Tea Party rallies and ask "Can you give an example of media bias?" That comes before the question as to whether the protesters are all just hateful bigots and morons.

If I was Jim Abrams' boss I would worry that he believes that Congress churning out 2,000 page unread documents constitutes being "productive." The difference between Congress and a newsroom is that if the Editors pass along garbage unread then the business fails and the primary ones who suffer are the employees. The market will provide alternative sources for the product if the customers want it. If Congress passes vast unread bills with toxic effects embedded then we all suffer from having bad laws and policies enacted. Just doing something is not the answer when facing a serious issue, and these are very serious, in fact life and death, issues being dealt with.

The most dangerous man in the world is the one who is both ambitious and stupid. That is the guy who goes off to prove himself by repairing the nuclear power plant without letting his boss know. Congress by not doing their jobs, by not carefully reading the bills and passing them only when they were sure that they would do no harm, allowed enthusiastic amateurs to cause real damage.

Then add to that repudiation of the charge that Congress has been "productive" the fact that many of the Democrats now in danger of losing their seats, like Barney Frank in Massachusetts, actually created the problems by passing the corrupting Community Reinvestment Act and enabling the financial legerdemain that turned Fannie Mae into the engine that ate Wall Street.

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