Brutally Honest Rant - 08/22/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Right Vs Efficiency
Audio Transcripts
08/22/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

There’s a scene in the move “Fight Club” where the unnamed narrator and star of the film talks about what he does for a living. Basically he goes around the country looking at automobile accidents, trying to determine if the cost of the defect is worth either a recall or just paying out people in lawsuits. Eventually he blackmails his boss with all the information that he knows about the automaker and their shoddy craftsmanship and tells him that his new job would be to simply stay quiet about these things, and that he can even do this job from home.

It’s somewhat confusing if you think about it, and the narrator doesn’t help matters with his math equation, but what it all boils down to is this… this fictional automaker would rather spend money either on recalls or in lawsuit settlements than in doing what it takes to fix a defect before their cars leave the factory.

It all comes down to two things… doing what is RIGHT versus doing what is efficient.

I’m sure that you’ve seen the commercials for VISA about their check card and how easy things seem to flow when all you have to do is swipe your card or ping it at the register and you’re on your way… and then some ugly dork shows up with actual CURRENCY, and everything grinds to a halt.

But what you don’t see is how many of those people who are “pinging” their cards or swiping them are using stolen credit cards. And maybe that explains WHY you have the dork having to pay for things with actual currency… because their credit card information was STOLEN from them by one of the other good-looking people, so they have to pay for everything in CASH.

It’s all about doing what is right versus doing what is efficient.

We’re seeing that now with all of these goods coming from China being defective or toxic! China apparently can’t even build an airplane that doesn’t explode! One of them exploded just the other day on the runway over in Japan! Sure they executed some guy who was the head consumer quality person, but that doesn’t solve the problem that they have right now, especially with the crap that is out on the shelves a half a world away.

Doing what is right versus doing what is efficient…

And of course efficiency is considered to be a good thing, right? It sometimes means being well-organized and well-kept. Unfortunately efficiency also means cutting costs, cutting steps, taking shortcuts when possible.

Our energy policy, going back several DECADES now, has been based on what is efficient instead of what is RIGHT. So now we have outdated refineries and outdated pipelines that we can’t afford to have replaced, nobody WANTS to replace them, and it’s cost-effective for them to simply repair what they have now and jack up the cost of energy to obscene degrees to make up the difference. We have become ENSLAVED to our own energy problems and in turn that has us ENSLAVED to unstable markets and unstable nations. None of it is RIGHT, and it was ALL done in the name of efficiency!

Same thing with our auto-makers. The so-called “big three” are DYING because NOBODY wanted to actually come up with a fuel-efficient vehicle even though we’ve been having an ever-increasing energy problem since the late 1990’s! You’d think that at least the gas crisis leading to the Gulf War would have served as a frigging wake-up call to them, but it wasn’t! They decided that it was better to just churn out these gas-guzzling urban assault vehicles and market them like they were chariots of the gods. And now, of course, they have all these vehicles that nobody wants to buy because they can’t afford to keep blowing a fortune on gas!

Think about it… it was actually more efficient for them to create and mass-market a vehicle with an inefficient fuel system than to do what was RIGHT!

This problem between doing what is right versus doing what is efficient can certainly be seen in the world of POLITICS today! In fact, it explains some of the problems that both parties are suffering from.

Ten years ago the Republican-controlled Congress brought forth articles of impeachment against the President of the United States for lying about an affair. Sure it was an uphill battle for them to pull it off. They had to take time away from normal legislative matters to argue whether or not they should even try it. But they did.

And even though they continually heard about how time was wasted and how the charge was meaningless and the subject of the lie was worthless, the Republicans continually said that was all about upholding the rule of law.

And you know what? At the time, they WERE right! It WAS about the rule of law… and that no president was above it, no matter how trite the subject was. And that was part of their character at the time. They acted on what they believed was RIGHT, not just what was “expedient”, because the most “expedient” thing to do would have been to do NOTHING and just let the Ken Star Report stand as the sideshow that it was.

It’s a pity that they forgot about that point, though, because eight years later, they pulled a complete reversal. They decided that it would be better to be expedient than to do what is right and get rid of their corrupt members. People like Bob Ney and Mark Foley. Maybe “good ol’ boy” politics kept that corrupt bastard Tom DeLay in place until his criminal indictment, but overlooking folks like Foley were simply inexcusable. And THAT ultimately helped to do them in.

And it’s not like they didn’t know HOW to do what is right either! These guys took time out of their legislative schedules to expel James Trafficant in 2002 after he was convicted of felony charges. They KNEW how to do what was right, but they decided to simply be expedient, and that cost them their power-hold in 2006.

So now it’s the Democrats that are calling the shots in Congress… and guess what? They’re making the same mistakes!

You have the Attorney General caught up in a lie, and you would THINK that the Democrats would seize upon that, but they aren’t. You have former White House aids actually engaging in open contempt by refusing to appear when given a subpoena, and the Congress isn’t taking things to the next step. And if you don’t know what I mean when I say “the next step”, then you need to understand that there is a REASON why the House and the Senate have a position called the “Sergeant at Arms”, and it is for this kind of situation!

Their liberal base has been clamoring for impeachment for months now, and the Democrats REFUSE to even consider it! You know why? Because they’re listening to their stupid, idiotic so-called “consultants” who get in front of the media and actually EXCUSE their inaction as being good for their changes in 2008 election!

“Oh no,” they constantly say, “Democrats shouldn’t act on this. We shouldn’t be wasting valuable time in the legislature pursuing this stuff. We have the Republicans right where we want them! Just having this out hurts the Republicans. We should just let this fester and hang it over their heads in the 2008 elections!”

And not only do the Democrats NOT take action, but they actually CAVE IN to the demands of the Bush Imperium time and time again! Oh, they can’t trust the words of the Attorney General, but they’ll still vote to give his office unlimited and unchallenging power to peer into our lives! The White House invokes Executive Privilege so often it pretty much becomes the resurrection of “Divine Right of Kings” but the Democrats continue to play ball with them.

And all of it is because their “consultants” are telling them that it’s good for them in the next election!

These so-called consultants are IDIOTS! They are pathetic, inept, incompetent MORONS! I have seen better crap from my cat’s litter box!

First of all, it’s becoming clear to this commentator that the Democrats really have absolutely NO FRIGGING IDEA how the hell they got back their power in Congress. NO IDEA WHATSOEVER! They didn’t just wake up one morning and have it magically fall on their lap. They were HANDED it to them by the ineptitude and incompetence of the Republicans. They weren’t the “better” candidates. They just weren’t the “worst”. And there IS a difference between the two concepts.

And now that they HAVE this power, they have an obligation to use it AS they promised that they would! They said that they needed to keep the Bush Imperium honest. Well guess what? You don’t do that by caving in! You don’t do that by making deals! You don’t do that by going part-way in an investigation and then say “oh, this is enough for us; we’ll just hang them with this in the next election.”

Let’s get brutally honest here… there comes a time when you HAVE to do what is right and TO HELL with what is considered “efficient”! That is what REAL CHARACTER is about!

Take a look at Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s request for articles of impeachment against the Vice President. For right reasons or wrong (and the neo-cons obviously will say it’s wrong), he’s taking a stand for what he believes in, just like the Republicans did ten years ago. He is showing more CHARACTER than all of the Democratic front-runners put together! In fact you look at the people who are still in the running… the ones who are constantly being told that they don’t have a chance in hell of winning. THESE are the people with CHARACTER! I would rather vote for any of them before I vote for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Thug Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mitch the Bitch Romney or any other so-called “front runner” out there.

Character is not about winning or losing. It’s about standing up for what you believe is RIGHT.

This is why the Democrats have a piss-poor record when it comes to elections. They have plenty of things that they stand AGAINST… but they really have nothing that they truly stand FOR! And those few things that they CLAIM to stand for are easily negotiated away. They’re bargained down, reasoned out of, and traded like old-fashioned baseball cards. It’s all about being “efficient.” It’s all about keeping things moving. And because of that, THEY LOSE!

I’ll make this really simple for the Democrats… if you say that you cannot trust the Attorney General to tell you the truth, then you DO NOT vote to give his office more power. PERIOD! NO EXCUSES! You start taking that power AWAY from him! PATRIOT ACT – GONE! FISA – GONE! If the White House doesn’t want to cooperate with you, then you DO NOT cooperate with the White House! It’s that simple!

You don’t play games with this sort of stuff. You don’t pussyfoot around with neo-cons on a power-trip, because they play for keeps. You don’t “mildly threaten” people with contempt because they decide not to show up for a hearing when given a subpoena. You send the Sergeant-at-Arms to their residence – WITH SIDEARMS – and you haul them over kicking and screaming like Paris Hilton!

You Democrats NEED to take a stand for what you believe in, and you need to take that stand NOW, because you WILL NOT have a chance to win in the next election if you don’t! There is no time to debate this anymore. Forget it! It’s GONE! You pissed it away! And you can personally thank your idiotic consultants and your so-called “political experts” for that!

And by the way, I am not saying all this as a Libertarian or as a political cynic, but as an AMERICAN CITIZEN who is tired of the games and who is tired of seeing my hard-earned tax money go to pay for this crap! Maybe we all need to organize a march on Washington to wake these people up… at the very least to do SOMETHING to show our discontent at the crap going on with BOTH parties!

I know this will be difficult to comprehend because of who is Speaker of the House right now, but you Democrats need to grow some frigging BALLS.

(Computer – Fired mix)
(Fade Music In – “Mythodea” by Vangelis)

Every time you have a two-term president on his final years in office, there is a very dangerous tactic that gets played. You do everything you can to stay in office until your time is up. Bill Clinton knew how this game was played, and actually he played it quite well, even after he was impeached.

And if anything, George W. Bush can afford to be even MORE dangerous than his predacessor, because he’s got NOTHING left to shoot for right now. He doesn’t have to run for re-election and he doesn’t have a “political heir” that he can pass his crusades to. So between now and January of 2009, all he has to do is stay in office and TO HELL with the rest of the world!

And that’s something that the Democrats need to bear in mind. This isn’t just “a game” to these neo-cons. They’re not playing to win… because as far as they are concerned, they have already won! They’re now playing for keeps! You’re not dealing with a “lame duck”… you’re dealing with a bunch of cornered pit bulls, and you Democrats need to respond accordingly.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

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(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

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