A Self Fulfilling Prophecy

At times, when reading about the Bush administration, I can't help but hope that at some point someone will pop up and say..."I hope you enjoyed our show." and realize it was all a bad dream.

I was reading the Paul Krugman column today in the NYT's and he brought up the inefficiency of the Bush administration. Two examples were FEMA and the VA. His point being about how well run the agencies were during the Clinton adminstration compared to the Bush years.

This was something I had been thinking about last summer. During that time, lI was reading the book, "And The Band Played On" by Randy Shilts. The book details the early years of the AIDS crisis. One of the main points of the book was the Reagan Administration response to the AIDS crisis. This was the period of budget cuts. Every program was under the hatchet. During this time, The CDC had to scramble for every dollar to confront the AIDS crisis. This included stealing money from other programs. Every request for money was greeted with a response of, "get it from the existing budget". And as the Reaganites dithered, the crisis deepened.

This story got me to thinking about the GOP mantra that government is bad and ineffective. It seems to me; and granted, I'm not a scholar in this area; that if you approach the government as being bad, you will do everything in your power to prove what you mean.

During the Reagan years, I was a support of making government smaller and efficient. However, I have learned that there is a huge difference between making the government smaller and making it more efficient. Clinton made FEMA efficient. He appointed someone who was qualified to run the department and received high and deserved praise for the work of FEMA during those years.

Now, we have the FEMA of today. I won't go into the whole story as I am sure everyone has a general understanding of what happened. However, the important point is this. If you don't trust the government. If you are someone who wants to slash and burn, without thinking throught the consequences of your actions, you will create an inefficient government that accomplishes nothing.

This current administration seems to be on the level of a circus. A bunch of clowns running around preforming gags and high-jinx to keep us entertained. However, in the process, the administration has created a joke of a government. It seems that week after week, something new comes out about failures, crimes, or mismanagemant that transends anything I can recall over the last 200 years.

Ultimately, if you believe that government is going to fail, it will fail. And under this administration, it is failing. It is time to return, as Paul Krugman put it, to the golden era of the Clinton Adminstration. Damn, how I miss those years.