Nobody's Listening

By Alan Caruba

"'There is an overall sense of frustration that no one is listening,'" pollster Scott Rasmussen said about a problem that has plagued the political party in power for decades." – Washington Times, April 2, 2010, "Independent voters turn from hopeful to angry."

The article examines the way Obama has lost the support of the great body of “independents”, people who do not identify themselves as either Democrat or Republican.

The polls, of course, all reflect the president’s falling approval rating, but the problem now for Americans is that it is clear the White House and a compliant Congress are not listening. Obama disparaged polls recently. He is not influenced by them. To put it another way, the public be damned.

Despite months of public protests of the healthcare bill and only because of a straight party-line vote (no Republican voted for it) the bill was passed and signed into law. The avalanche of lies told before and since about Obamacare has resulted in a law that only Obama’s core of supporters—Ronald Reagan used to call them Welfare Queens—still believe will benefit the nation.

Within days, Obama’s EPA director announced new regulations regarding auto mileage and the agency’s intent to regulate carbon dioxide, a natural gas essential to all life on Earth. There is now the likelihood that Congress will ram through the disastorous Cap-and-Trade Act, a tax on all energy use.

Despite the exposure of the biggest fraud of the modern era, "global warming", the Obama administration is pressing ahead with legislation based on it!

A general amnesty is likely, too, as Mexicans begin to stream across the border, fleeing the drug wars in that nation, and seeking asylum.

Dick Morris, the political commentator, notes correctly that a Republican controlled Congress can nullify Obamacare by refusing to fund it, but November looks further and further away at this point.

The other element at work is the way the bulk of the nation’s news media have utterly abandoned its most essential function; keeping an eye on government and revealing the truth about elected officials and dubious legislative proposals.

We have arrived at a point in this nation where the only reliable news to be found in the daily newspaper is in the sports section. At least the scores are accurate.

Meanwhile, the headlines everywhere today speak of new jobs added while also noting a stubborn 9.7 rate of unemployment and that is not likely to diminish any time soon. The only bright spot is that Obama can no longer blame this on the Bush administration.

When a nation’s press betrays it, the only remaining hope for any truth is to be found in the many news/opinion Internet sites and yet I am plagued by the same feeling expressed in Rasmussen’s comment that those in power are not listening and that the only option that remains to save the nation from them are the midterm elections.

In the interim, economic stagnation will be the rule.

Not everyone reads the conservative comment on the Internet and liberal websites like the Huffington Post are thriving. While the network news shows continue to lose viewers and Fox News continues to grow, the deliberate destruction of the nation’s economy continues.

One is forced to ask, does it matter when the entire governmental structure of the nation is now controlled by the machine politics of Chicago? By the lies about global warming? By more and more restrictions on real access to the nation’s natural resources?

There is, finally, the harm that results from the combination of a limited general knowledge of American and world history and an attention span that grows shorter week by week.

We are reaching the apogee of a lot of very bad decisions and failed government programs that suggest the worst is yet to come.

Everybody knows this, but what does that avail Americans when neither protests, nor recent elections of Republican governors and a new Republican Senator from Massachusetts leave us vulnerable to the increasingly rapid predation of Marxists?

© Alan Caruba, 2010