A Growing Sense Of Anger At Obama – And Others

I’m so angry I feel like concealing a loaded hand gun and walking into a national park.

No, I’m not going postal. Once Pres. Obama signs the new credit card law, it will be legal for anyone to march around Yellowstone packing heat just for the fun of it. Although it’s usually angry, bitter, little men who need the security of feeling cold steel against their body, and I’m 6’2” and not bitter, I sure as hell am angry.

I am angry at Congressional Democrats – especially those in the Senate – who are so afraid of the National Rifle Assn. than they allowed the gun amendment to be tacked on to a consumer protection reform bill. Watch: As soon as some deranged lunatic toting an AK-47 wipes out half the crowd waiting for Old Faithful to erupt, the NRA will shrug its shoulders and claim it’s what the Founding Fathers intended.

I am furious at Pres. Obama for getting all testy, even shirty, yesterday when civil liberty and human rights advocates complained to him during a meeting in the Cabinet Room about reinstating kangaroo courts at Guantanamo and not investigating war crimes or crimes against humanity committed by senior members of the Bush administration.

I’m livid with Nancy Pelosi for not having her facts straight before speaking out about the CIA lying to her and deliberately misleading Congress about torturing prisoners of war – and who knows what else – thus handing the Republicans an issue to divert the nation’s attention from the real issue of who, what, when, where, why and how turned the beacon of liberty, freedom and the rule of law into a modern day equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with self-righteous, all-knowing, high priests.

I am infuriated with Republicans for deliberately turning themselves into a late night talk show joke instead of being a constructive opposition party. The US needs two vibrant political parties yet the GOP thinks Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindahl are leading thinkers on its come back trail.

I am angry at Wall St. and the financial services industry for shuffling their feet while giving half-hearted apologies for plunging the world into economic chaos while shouting full-throated defences of its other-worldly compensation structure that encourages its executives to create a multi-trillion dollar trading scheme built on nothing more than computer entries.

I am furious with the medical business for saying one thing publicly but behind the scenes play lobbyist games over providing the nation with decent, affordable health care, allowing its surrogates to raise the same spectre of “socialised medicine” as the American Medical Assn. used back in the 1960s when Medicare was proposed.

I am incensed by a physician acquaintance in Ohio who is a highly regarded specialist with a seven figure income who complains to me that any of the current health reform proposals will cut his income in half, at least, as if his life would disintegrate if he had to live on only five or six hundred thousand dollars a year. Better 47-million people not have access to his training, skills and expertise than he drops one of his two country club memberships because of personal financial hardship.

Oh. And I’m really pissed off at my cable company – but who isn’t? My six year old remote fried its insides so I went to the cable store and it was replaced. Fine. But in the last six years, some buttonhead decided to move all of the buttons around on the remote, including where the on-off, channel, mute and last viewed buttons are located – the ones I use all the time. Why? What was the point? To make people angry and drive them insane?

I’ll cut this off here. A six hundred word rant is enough. I am increasingly angry at a lot of people right now, so much so that I’m reminded of the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal who once wrote, “The more I know of people, the better I love my dog.”