This week’s calamitous financial rollercoaster with its subsequent impact on stock markets, retirement portfolios, interest rates and national stability has many Americans muttering the same thing about the two feuding houses of Congress.
This week a New York Times/CBS poll reported that 82 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress. An 18 percent approval rating? What pols can hope for re-election, regardless of party, with that kind of approval rating?
A new USA Today/Gallup poll reports that 24 percent of people surveyed felt members of Congress deserved re-election while 67 percent said they did not.
A plague on both houses indeed. The S & P downgrading of the U.S. credit rating was discounted by some as being more about politics than economics. Well, so what? Perhaps the thinkers at S & P were as stunned as the rest of us to watch our elected officials drive the bus off a cliff. An unyielding and rabid minority fringe party hijacked the Republicans with the acquiescence of the Democrats and the president and came damned close to pushing the country into default.
“The effectiveness, stability and predictability of American policy-making and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges,” wrote S & P in its downgrade report.
Right. When we can’t count on our leaders to put country before party and country before re-election, perhaps we aren’t as secure and stable as we would like to think.
The level of discourse in Washington is beyond uncivil. It is belligerent, rancorous, bellicose and driven by the extreme rhetoric of the Tea Partiers who, with all likelihood, will lose seats in 2012 rather than gain them.
There are still 15 months until the 2012 election and it is anyone’s guess what will happen. The stock market is in a freefall, which may or may not end. Unemployment remains high; home prices are stagnant. And there is no news coming out of Washington to indicate that by the heroic efforts of any elected official things might change.
A plague on both houses.
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