Although some may attack our local leaders for refusing the easy way out – tax, tax, tax – others commend them for the courage to hold the line.  The bloated budgets and unrealistic entitlement attitudes of the past have led us to the brink of the abyss, and it takes courage to tell those who always want more, more, more that the new more is less because the old more was too much.  But at least we don’t have the ethical lapses and moral depravity that continue to define the run away train of excess that is our national government.

When the San Francisco über-liberal Nancy Pelosi became the Speaker of the House, she said she was going to drain the swamp of political corruption she claimed was created by 12 years of Republican control of Congress.  Instead of draining anything, Speaker Pelosi and her ham-fisted cohorts have brought slime time to prime time as they wallow in what they came to drain.

Rep. Charles Rangel, who’s been in charge of writing tax policies for the Democratic Congress, couldn’t seem to pay his own taxes or even report millions of dollars of income.  This, of course, is everyone else’s fault.  He has been forced to resign as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.  Then, there’s the curious case of the Democrat representative from New York who eagerly resigned rather than face an ethics investigation and then imploded on national television.  Now, the question becomes to what did the speaker know and when did she know it.  Allegations have surfaced that her office was informed last year about Congressman Massa’s tickle parties and Greco-Roman wrestling matches with male staffers but did not inform the ethics committee.  

Where will this cavalcade of corruption lead?   Detroit is a picture of America’s future.  After decades of control by progressive Democrats, what was once one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the world has degenerated to the point where banks are paying people to take abandoned houses and the best idea they have is to downsize the city by converting empty lots into farmland.  With a 75 percent dropout rate in their schools and yes, Virginia, blatant corruption and low morals in high places, a collapsing economy and massive social dislocation, Detroit is a vision for the shabby world progressivism creates.  

When Detroiters lined up to collect what they called Obama Money, they couldn’t tell interviewers where the money they were waiting to receive came from – all they knew was it was free, and someone was handing it out.  This is where Nancy and her ethically challenged followers are leading America, a world where some people are bilked so others can receive freebees that never raise them out of poverty and instead encase them in it.

Is this shabby future inevitable?  Is there any chance of avoiding the toxic embrace of this corrupt swamp creature?  One more free election, one without the heavily democrat illegal immigrant and convicted felon populations voting and without his honor Mayor Daley and ACORN counting the votes, and we’ll see America hand the Pelosi-Reid super majority their hat and show them the door.

The damage that can be done before we show this crowd of progressives to the back benches may hang on like a summer cold.  Health care reform with thousands of pages of governmentese double-speak has the potential to become the pile of paper that devoured a nation.  No entitlement once established has ever been repealed, and since we aren’t allowed to know what’s in it until it passes, who knows what anti-freedom, anti-liberty provisions it will foist on us.   Cap-and-tax cobbled together with various bits of legislation, executive orders and bureaucratic regulation may lurch off the table and start pushing us towards $7-a-gallon gas and the dislocations this would bring all in the name of discredited Al and his band of unethical cheating scientists.  Millions of acres of potentially rich energy producing land may be seized and forever locked in the fed’s clinging claw while NASA is slated to become the eye-in-the-sky for the man-made global warming fanatics.  There’s the international apology tours and “We Are the World/Workers of the World Unite” silliness that are daily depreciating the American brand.  And the hockey stick curve that represents our national debt will weigh down generations of Americans.

The damage the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate causes before we drain their swamp will hang like a mill stone around the neck of our nation.  It will take more than a stake of holly or a silver bullet to bring these progressive policies down.  It will take a populace educated in the founding documents of our republic.  A people determined to re-establish the last, best hope of mankind.  A people dedicated to resuscitating a nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  It will take citizens resolved that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College and History for the American Public University System.  http://drrobertowens.com © 2010 Robert R. Owens dr.owens@comcast.net.