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26, 2006 Throw the Rascals Out By Jack D. McNamara “All politics is local,” famously said the famous Massachusetts pol “Tip” O’Neill, who was Speaker of the House a couple of decades ago. Less than two weeks remain before we test that famous maxim in the 2006 nationwide elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, a third of the U.S. Senate, state legislatures and numerous state offices. Partly because it is not a presidential election year tradition holds that the focus is more easily placed on the local elections in this broad and diverse nation. But not this year. President George W. Bush is on the hustings insulting his Democratic opponents and they in turn are countering with their criticisms of him and his party. Last week the chattering classes became fairly giddy with delight. Polls indicate that Republicans will take a major drubbing across the board, from the Iraq fiasco to the Foley imbroglio. It is a political battleground on which the Republican Party holds the commanding terrain. They hold the Presidency and both houses of the U.S. Congress. Here in Texas Republicans hold every state office and both houses of the Legislature. With such domination, however, comes dissatisfaction. Every political decision taken or not taken becomes the responsibility of the majority party. The majority party struggles to maintain dominance. The struggle inevitably leads to mistakes and the mistakes are compounded as the majority sees public opinion turning away from them. Some — perhaps most — cannot reform. So they go down to defeat in elections. What goes around comes around. Throw the rascals out. Try again. Iraq, Katrina, Mark Foley, Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Randy Cunningham, 14,000 earmarks, 12 million illegal immigrants, selling ports to Dubai, North Korea, Iran … the beat goes on. Never in history, we hear, has an American administration been so inept and incompetent. And as a matter of fact, the U.S. did defeat both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in 44 months. We have been in Iraq for 42 months and we are very unlikely to finish that mess in the next two months. Why? Because the best ever rationale for the uncontrolled and reckless expenditures of public dollars is a war (we are at war in Iraq and Afghanistan though the other stuff is problematic). U.S. Representative Henry Bonilla came through Alpine Monday to announce “$2 million in U.S. Department of Defense funding for testing of a Deployable Aqueous Aerobic Bioreactor (which we will designate “DAAB”)” for coordination by the Sul Ross Uvalde campus. A little Internet research indicates that what we are talking about here is a biological process using liquid and air to eat toxic stuff. They know about it in Kurdistan and the technology has been around since the 1990s when readers may remember Texas A&M was developing little critters to eat oil spills. You might use the process at a landfill, a Super Fund site, or — in the case of the U.S. armed services — a chemical weapons site in Kurdistan. In fact, you might buy one right now from a vendor in Rockford, Illinois, the constituency of U.S. Representative Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives. Whatever our representatives might do for their DAAB, they are not doing for the troops actually fighting in Iraq. Our October Marine Corps Gazette tells us in an unusual editorial, “Is the Marine Corps Broke?” Referring to current studies in the public press, “These studies argue that if funding is not increased to pay the huge costs associated with repairing or replacing the equipment that has been destroyed or damaged fighting our enemies in the long war on terrorism, the Marine Corps could be headed for a fiscal train wreck.” The shortage of funds facing the Corps now is $12 billion, and $5 billion in successive years. While incumbent Republicans were carpet-bombing us with earmarks from a federal $400 billion budget in deficit, our Alpine City Council was doing its part. In early October the council voted to use a site at the municipal airport to build an animal shelter. The project has been kicking around for five years of scandal, horror and malfeasance. On October 17 the council, less Avinash Rangra, reversed itself. They received “calls” from citizens who said there is a better use of the airport property. Of course, none of the callers or any of the three men who spoke against the airport/animal shelter site offered any coherent ideas or any money for their preferred use of the site. In a helpful effort Steve Belardo of Rainbow Adobe said the site was used for a parking lot three or four days every year during the Balloon Bash. Enough of this. For years good decent humane citizens in Alpine have tried to work with the city to fulfill the city’s responsibilities. Now we have a competent proposal and it had a life of two weeks. We should take city hall OUT of the animal shelter business. Contract with a competent agency like the Jeff Davis County Humane Society. Come to think of it, the functioning of the city of Alpine is very like the functioning of the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress. • (Also published by the Big Bend Sentinel of Marfa, Texas October 26, 2006.) |