No Shortage of Idiots

Have you ever wondered why rhetoric is often referred to as empty? Well, read on and I will do my level best to provide an answer.

It seems to me that in these tough times, the fear of 'shortages' lives large in peoples' hearts. A couple of years ago, I recall that a media panic over a potential rice shortage caused people to run out and buy up all the rice they could possibly store. Not surprisingly, it caused a rice shortage.

The one thing there never seems to be a shortage of is stupidity. I read an article today on how the US government is not doing enough to deal with people who have been caught behaving unethically or illegally on a very large scale. The millionaire and billionaire fraud-mongers get caught with their fingers in the cookie jar and precious little is done to them. There are more and more cases popping up all the time too, apparently. The person who wrote the article and the people who posted online responses seemed to me to be probably of the same socio-economic demograph and thus, quite probably, the same political stripe, as the people being written about. Ah, the one street where there is no such thing as 'street cred', Wall Street.

"What is he prattling on about?" asks the bleary-eyed blog visitor, "Damn it, man, make your point!"

Alright, I understand young people not having the patience to read an entire article and I don't have any pictures or links for this one. Here we go: one of the respondents to the article likened Obama's failure to act against these white collar criminals as having something to do with his class warfare. If you want to stick around for the rest of the article, here's the spoiler alert-it's going to be me ripping that nonsense apart.

First: if the person who wrote that response really thinks there is class warfare going on in America now, what's he going to think when half starved, starry-eyed fanatics dressed in battle fatigues and carrying AK-47s kick down his front door looking for food? Or the keys to his Mercedes? Or when they decide to firebomb his front yard? Class warfare doesn't look like you having to put out money for your gardener's health care benefits, it looks like what I just described. Maybe it looks like a little like Occupy Wall Street was just a sniff of what's coming and now you're scared. When your daughter comes home from college for the holidays, have your security personnel pat her down for weed and any writings by Che Guevera, know what I mean?

Second: Hey, how much do you think that the majority shareholders in companies like Remington and Colt and Savage are worth?  So, don't complain to me when those class warfare-istas show up on your doorstep armed to the teeth. I bet those company owners voted just like you did and I bet you guys are the first ones to step up and protect Second Amendment rights in America. Good for you! A well regulated militia is exactly what you can call the security company that keeps your gated community free of these riff-raff. Teabag that, you ruffians! Hey, wasn't that ...back in the 1700's...a bunch of people opposed to the Crown? Wouldn't that sort of make what happend a ..class warfare? Oh yeah, only for the foot soldiers, not the officers. Oh well, I tried.

Third; And this one is kind of important, a few years ago the US Senate had a problem with the practices of the biggest accounting firms in the world, so they put together one of their little subommittees they are so fond of and said, "we're going to regulate your affairs" The accounting firms said "go ahead, you do that and we'll just close our doors and move to Europe and watch your economy collapse from over there". The Senate, understandably did what they're best at....nothing. If the big accounting firms can get away with that, what chances does the US government have against the big banks? Seriously.  There are threats and there is empty rhetoric. Those banks do not answer to the federal government, it's the other way around. In fact, the only guarantee the government has of staying in business is the fact of where they get their revenues from...taxpayers. If you think the fiscal cliff is dangerous to the global economy, (and it's really a myth) it's not even a scrach on an elephant's hindquarters compared to banks the size of Bank of America or CitiGroup shutting down. Why do you think no one went to jail for that giant scam in 2008? Exactly.

So there we have it, empty rhetoric versus real threats. Nikita Kruschev took off his shoe and pounded it on a table to try to impress upon John Kennedy how scary he was. Only slightly over 40 years before him, the people that put his political system in place slit the throats of the Romanov family to seize power in Russia. Kruschev was empty rhetoric, the Bolshevik Revolution was real class warfare.