Please, MR. President, Take A LOOOONG Vacation!

Please, MR. President, Take A LOOOONG Vacation!

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

The only time I feel really safe is when the Congress and the President are recessed and/or out of town.  That is not an original statement.  Someone said it long before I -- and that makes it even weightier, or lends it more gravitas, if you please.

I have heard it asked so many times in the past few days whether the President should be taking a vacation at this particular time.  To that I answer… YES!   Get him the heck away from Washington and keep him away as long as possible!

Hey, I won’t even complain about the taxpayer money it is costing us to house, feed, and protect the First Family, IF the President will just stay away.

Middle class Americans are begging the Obama Administration to please stop trying to help us.  It seems everything they try only makes matters worse.  I am of the opinion that it is time for them to back off and allow us to catch our collective breath.

So far, the Obama Administration has been lurching from one crisis to another almost on a weekly, or monthly basis.  Their efforts at solving the nations problems seem juvenile, at best.  In fact, one wonders if a group of high-schoolers from “Boy’s (or Girl’s) State” couldn’t do as good a job, and … with a little effort, a better job than the bunch of seemingly clueless, er, people who are stumbling and bumbling through the worst presidency this county has ever experienced.

Yes!  I AM glad the President is out of town.  I am equally glad the Congress is out of town … even though the House is meeting every day in “pro-forma” sessions, lasting minutes or even seconds, to stop the President from making those annoying “recess appointments.”

No, I don’t worry because they are out of town.  I worry that they are coming back in September.  And the President has promised a NEW PLAN that will end all problems and solve all the nation’s financial puzzles, which seem to be wrapped in the most disturbing enigma ever.  (My apologies to Sir Winston Churchill.)  Now THAT scares the living daylights out of me.       

Yeah, come September we will have THREE entities to worry about as opposed to the two we have now:  The Office of the President, the Congress, and that mini-congress called the “Super Committee.”

Expect a continuation of one crisis after the other.  The President’s plan is already dead on arrival in the US House of Representatives.  The Congress’s plan is dead upon arrival at the President’s desk, and if the 12 members of the super committee don’t break out in fistfights and manage to pass something out of their partisan pit, it, too, will be dead as a doornail when it comes before the full Congress.

See what I mean?

By this Christmas, the outrage of the American people will be at historical levels and will certainly damage the “goodwill” of the holiday season.

Keep in mind that all this legislative wrangling will be going on while the presidential campaign is really heating up with accusations and counter accusations flying in both directions like snowflakes in an Oklahoma blizzard.  It’s going to be a long, long, fall and an even longer year ‘til November of 2012.

I was thinking, just the other day, that maybe it is time to bring back dueling.  Now -- think about it.  Dueling was an honorable way to settle “affairs of honor.”  Just think of the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate meeting in a clearing down in “Foggy Bottom” on the banks of the Potomac, swaddled in the mists of dawn to settle their differences.  Having chosen rapiers as their weapons, they’d have at it with full coverage by every TV network on the planet.

Of course, there would be a rather large turn over of Senate Majority Leaders and Speakers of the House, at least for a while, until the escalating loss of political talent in the Congress forced a more amicable approach to legislating. 

Yeah, I know it is a far-fetched idea. But it would certainly serve to focus our legislator’s attention on their jobs and not so much their reelections.

Term limits, in my opinion, would have given the US a more effective legislature.  But the Supreme Court has ruled term limits unconstitutional.  Of course, if the constitution was amended in such a way as to make congressional term limits constitutional -- then that would make the Supreme Court’s ruling void an of no account. 

I know.  That, too, is just a dream because no Congress is going to limit its member’s time in their cushy offices with all the perks that go with the trappings of power.

But some flicker of light may be seen in the darkness at the end of this long tunnel America is traversing today -- Election Day 2012. 

Another purge of the Congress is shaping up next year.  As the pollsters continue to point out, Americans are extremely dissatisfied with the Congress and the President. That is pointing to another historical change in the make-up of both houses of the Congress and the Oval Office.

For now, however, we can revel in the fact that the people making American’s lives miserable are currently out of town -- on vacation.   Ain’t it grand?

J. D. Longstreet