America’s Most Tolerated Dangers
If asked, most Americans would agree that economic and financial chaos or a stunning terrorist attack by foreign jihadis possibly with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction constitute among the gravest threats to the United States.
But the United States faces other more immediate, yet tolerated, dangers that have done and are doing irreparable harm to the nation. Sadly, these dangers don’t provoke enough public fury or even attention to motivate corrective action.
These tolerated threats are bad governance, hubris and self-delusion. Bad government is so wide spread that the public accepts Washington’s dysfunctionality as the new norm. And hubris and self-delusion have been so assimilated into the national culture and vocabulary as to be an integral part of this new norm as cancer is to healthy human cells.
About bad government, it may well be that a system of checks and balances cannot operate effectively as long as both political parties are driven by ideological extremes that view compromise as capitulation and exercise of reason as disloyalty or political treason.
Sequestration as mandated by the Budget Control Act isn’t merely evidence of broken government. It is a symptom of political insanity as it allows no flexibility in taking these relatively small cuts rationally, maximizing the damage — except when it affects Congress.