A Catastrophic Tone

Sometimes the conversation turns a little away from the subject at hand and lands on the tone of that conversation. It’s an issue all to itself: the tone of civil discourse, and of course the lack of it. In truth, I wonder if effective civil discourse can actually have a civil tone. If everyone is calm, where is the real desire to get anything done or to keep anything from happening?

This year started out with the President and his democrat controlled Congress rolling out an 800 plus Billion dollar stimulus package that seemed to come out of nowhere. We were told that they wanted it, but not specifically what was in it, and that if it didn’t pass the results to the economy would be catastrophic. We saw the government take control of General Motors and then give a 37% interest to the labor unions (who arguably were more than a little responsible for its problems in the first place). Again we were told that the alternative would be catastrophic.

Then there’s HR 2454: The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Cap and Trade. The energy bill which the President freely admits will cause energy costs to skyrocket, but explains won’t cost consumers a dime because of taxes and fees that will be levied on energy suppliers and given back to the poor to pay their light bills. Again, failure to pass this legislation will be catastrophic to the world in general and then to the U.S...

Failure to do anything that this administration proposes is predicted to have catastrophic results. That brings me to HR 3200 (The American’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009). This bill was written by special interests groups and rolled out for an easy pre-recess passage, but somehow by the grace of God the discourse finally became uncivil. People started asking what the heck was in that 1000 page monstrosity, and no one could answer except to say that failure to pass it would result in (you guessed it) catastrophe. Legislators went home on recess and set about explaining why they were going to pass it even though they didn’t know what was in it and their constituents let them know in no uncertain terms that if they did they’d be looking for new jobs after their next election cycles. Make no mistake. Those lawmakers didn’t go to the town meetings looking for input, or for discussion. They went to lecture and inform as to what they planned to do. And people reciprocated and informed their representatives what THEY planned to do in return.

It seems that a lot of people (center and right) have begun to recognize that when the President tells them that it isn’t the details of the legislation that matter, but the spirit, what he really means is that the results are going to be catastrophic.

But that’s just what an Average guy thinks.