Slaughterhouse 57

Slaughterhouse 57
START TIME: 9:50
END TIME: 11:07
WORD COUNT: 970

“Assess President Obama's first year in office.”

See, I KNEW it. I know the political temperament of a lot of the Slaughterhouse readership, and I know some of you are ready to hurl a brick through your monitor at the very mention of his name, and a lot of you are looking to see if I can write something that rips the lungs out of every Republican from here to Crawford, Texas.

And I have a hard time doing this. First off, anytime somebody blames “the Government” for anything, I remember that I work for the taxpayers of Clark County, Nevada and the City of Las Vegas (doing what exactly, I’d rather not share), so I know that “the Government” is not some massive organism like Godzilla, stomping around and wrecking shit for the hell of it. It’s people who have been given a job to do because other people were too lazy or stupid or venal or criminal to just make things happen the way they were supposed to, so instead we get government. If you were smart enough to realize that we live in the middle of the fucking desert and you’re not going to be allowed to have a rice paddy or a cranberry bog because we don’t have the water for you to attempt that nonsense, you may not need much government. But maybe you argue against things like fluoridated water and vaccinations and zoning. Maybe you’re one of those people I see on television every once in a while screaming that the government should get its hands off your Medicare, which is akin to the butcher running after you in the parking lot and telling you not to burn his steak.

I believe in government doing a few small things for our country and then leaving us the hell alone; I believe that you can do pretty much whatever you want with your life as long as you don’t expect me to participate or pay for it. I believe there are things that we do collectively because it wouldn’t be as good to do them ourselves, like build a road or defend our nation, and that should be about it.

That said, I did vote for President Obama, I did help the campaign, and I extorted promises from several people who said that I would probably agree with a lot of his ideas – and believe me, my friends are anything but a bunch of giddy liberal crusaders who have shoulder-length hair and Phish albums – that the moment he turned out to be just another politician, they owed me drinks so that we could get drunk together.

It’s been over a year and I haven’t collected.

I like Barack Obama because he’s an intelligent man who has the capability to relate to other people as a human being. (If you want to doubt his intelligence I’ll expect a response as to why you weren’t the president of the Harvard Law Review.) Even though I didn’t vote for John Kerry because he made my skin crawl, I liked Obama's speech to the convention that talked about how we aren't red states and blue states, but people - and as a former Republican from a very blue state who's now more of a purplish character in a very blue city from a very red state, if you count all the empty parts - that resonated.

First off, he compares favorably to his predecessor. For everyone who said that the only reason the President sounds so smart is he’s reading from a TelePrompTer, I would respectfully point out that I have yet to see him wade into a sentence like a big game hunter with a knife between his teeth, and let’s all agree that presentation skills are part of the job. You never knew WHAT George W. Bush was going to say, sometimes with amazing results (“I can hear you, and the people who did this are going to hear from us soon enough”) and sometimes with genuine mystery (“So long as I'm the president, my measure of success is victory -- and success”). There was a reason he left office with an approval rating in the 20s.

Secondly, in the Sheer Raw Titanium Balls The Size Of Grapefruits category, you can’t beat the fact that both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were proposed as supplemental expenditures. This means that they were not voted on as part of the budget, and therefore they were not counted as part of a budget deficit. The Obama budget when he came into office was the first to incorporate both wars to get a true fiscal cost of what these wars were actually running us.

Have you tried this yourself? Have you explained to your bank that you’re declaring your mortgage “off budget,” so all of the money that you’re spending on a mortgage doesn’t count against your net worth? They take a dim view of that sort of thing. So when the Republicans start howling about the fact that B. Hussein is some no good commie socialist who’s plunging the budget into areas the likes of which we’ve never seen, ask how that off budget thing is working. There was nothing supplemental this year, and there isn’t next year, either.

And if a Republican wants to start hollering at you about “things that are going to bankrupt my childrens’ futures, you can point out their side passed Medicare Part D, which cost $634 billion to give drugs to seniors, and which Wikipedia notes, “By the design of the program, the federal government is not permitted to negotiate prices of drugs with the drug companies, as federal agencies do in other programs. The Veterans Administration, which is allowed to negotiate drug prices and establish a formulary, pays 58% less for drugs, on average, than Medicare Part D.[32] For example, Medicare pays $785 for a year's supply of Lipitor (atorvastatin), while the VA pays $520. Medicare pays $1,485 for Zocor, while the VA pays $127.” Nice of you to jump on for fiscal restraint now, once we’re down to the last can of tuna fish – particularly after the Star-Kist was going out the door by the case in the last decade.

I’m curious to see how the rest of the administration’s efforts turn out. It looks as if the Republicans are on the verge of forgetting that hey, we don’t like you either, and seem to feel there aren’t consequences to obstructing rather than governing.

In short, I think it’s an improvement, but I also think it’s too soon to tell.