Like a Crazy Neighbor

The political machine in Washington DC is like being next to crazy neighbors.

Most of the time you just hear them from over the fence, squabbling and yelling. Once in a while they get really out of hand. They do something stupid like park their car in your flower bed.

To most of us, most of the time, the noise in DC is a low level annoyance that we just want to ignore. We hear them fighting over the fence, but as long as their crap doesn't get too crazy, we pretend they aren't there. Occasionally they do something really stupid and dangerous, like the whole fiscal cliff fiasco.

They point a “fiscal cliff” gun to their heads and go through a lot of yelling and posturing about how to stop the gun from going off. The problem is that they aren't really pointing it at their heads but ours. The crazy neighbor who threatens to blow his house up has no problem taking the whole neighborhood with him.

Real life crazy neighbors can be dealt with. Eventually they do something so off the wall that the cops haul them away.

Voting used to be our policing function to deal with crazy DC neighbors. That used to work better than it does now. Sure, we might get rid of one crazy, but his replacement is from the same in-bred dysfunctional clan: the Politician Family. It's like the the crazy neighbor who got hauled away for setting your garage on fire got replaced by his twin brother who just got out of prison.

Like Einstein said: you can't solve problems with the same type of thinking that caused them.

You can't fix the craziness next door by swapping one crazy person for another crazy person.

-Sixbears