Let’s have a peek at just a few of the top political theater plays on tap for this off-year election season. We can’t put them in any order of popularity yet because it is not clear which of them will connect best with the short attention spans of the citizenry or garner the most in donations from the mega-rich.
One of the offerings will be the continuing investigation into that tragic September night in Benghazi back in 2012 when U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods lost their lives. Speaker Boehner promises that this new investigation will not degenerate into a circus or even a sideshow, but this field has been plowed so many times that it is difficult to imagine finding any new ground so how could it be anything else? The cast will be heavily weighted with actors from the right side of the stage even if the troop on the left sends in their clowns and that is not yet clear.
Another play will be the remake of box office bust from 2013 centered on the IRS scrutiny of Political Action Committees to determine if they qualified for the tax-exempt status being claimed. The remake will feature a new cast of actors as the last one was never able to command the audience’s attention for very long.
On the other side of the street there will be attempt to bring in the theater goers with a debate format over the ongoing inability to do anything about the broken immigration system here in the United States. The audience will be pounded with “we said” and “they said” lines delivered with obviously lacking authenticity and little emotion so this play may close early.
There was supposed to be a medical drama for our entertainment. The marquee was already up for “Obamacare – House of Horrors.” Alas, the ratings on the earlier play “Obamacare – It will Never Work” was so far from reality that this latest offering may never open in all the theaters that had been expecting it to be a blockbuster.
Finally, there may be a play loosely based on the notion that “Jobs – The Government doesn’t know how to create them,” but recent data suggests that the continuing trend of improving economic growth may cool the enthusiasm for this storyline. Especially, when there is so much news from the private industry side of the story showing terminations rather than hirings.
Complicating all of these plays is the ongoing squabbles within the two troops of actors. On the right, there is disagreement on how conservative should the conservatives be and whether or not they should ever agree with their opponents on the left – Especially, the President. On the left, the actors have always come to any play with such wide diversity of opinion that their leadership could rarely keep them together.
So there you have it – The lineup of political theater for your entertainment between now and November. We may see some last minute shows thrown together, but the potential audience is expected to be small so the storylines had better be spectacular or there won’t be much interest.
The problem with all these plays is that they all deal with outcomes. In fact, when we think about all the political theater offerings of the last many years, it has always been about outcomes. Whatever the issue was, those in favor and those against were always talking about the outcome and how it would destroy our country or be our salvation depending on who you most agreed with. All these plays have essentially fallen into the category of mindless entertainment because they were all works of fiction.
Everything our Federal Government does is based on authority which flows from the Constitution of the United States of America. When we read the Constitution critically, we must admit that it doesn’t dictate any particular outcome, but rather our responsibilities to uphold the principals of this great nation. The Constitution gives us a framework and a process to use as guidance as we chart our way to an American future. It is clear in its text that we should do our work in a certain way to find the desires of the majority of our citizens – We might say the average citizen plus one. Of course, none of us is average so that means we should all be slightly disappointed with any outcome, but we should all give a standing ovation to the cast for following the process by which they determined that outcome. Sadly, the political parties and special interests have been down in the pit conducting the orchestra and controlling the play without regard to audience desires.
It’s the process, stupid! When we remember that and start to elect our Senators and Representatives on that basis, we will be able to realize the exceptional future our forefathers envisioned for us.
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