Chuckle Worthy Poll of the Day

A few people may wonder why in the world I have placed an image of William F. Buckley in this post. Allow me to cite the newest Rasmussen poll on the view the public has about Congress:

Congress was front and center in the national news last week and the American people were far from impressed. If they could vote to keep or replace the entire Congress, 59% of voters would like to throw them all out and start over again. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 17% would vote to keep the current legislators in office.

Today, just 23% have even a little confidence in the ability of Congress to deal with the nation’s economic problems and only 24% believe most Members of Congress understand legislation before they vote on it.

Last week, the House of Representatives initially rejected a financial bailout bill proposed by the Bush Administration. Later, after the Senate added a number of items that some call “pork” and others call “sweeteners,” the measure eventually passed. While the bill survived Washington, it did so at a time when just

30% of voters favored it and 45% were opposed.

Only half (49%) believe that the current Congress is better than individuals selected at random from the phone book. Thirty-three percent (33%) believe a randomly selected group of Americans could do a better job and 19% are not sure.

And now I present the reason why I posted the picture of Mr. Buckley. See, he had a similar idea about Congress:

“I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

We can certainly relate to Mr. Buckley's opinion. It is clear that Congress is not necessarily broken, but that the people serving in Congress have been there far too long to have our best interests in mind. They failed to listen to the public on this so-called rescue bill. Thomas and I believe that this bill will provide short-term relief, and that this will end up costing us far more than the $850+ billion that was agreed to. In fact, it was Michelle Malkin that posted a set of headlines she received from a Senate staffer where the headlines scream that the money in the rescue bill was simply not enough.

People now see that Congress does not have our best interests in mind. Furthermore, the entrenched political elites flat-out refuse to investigate those that perpetuated this problem. The investigation should start with the likes of Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, and anyone else who shrieked that Fannie and Freddie were fine as those two government entities continued to cook their books for ultimate payoffs.

We could have allowed the market to work this out, which is the natural order of things. Businesses would have gone under, and been swallowed up by other businesses. We saw it with Merrill-Lynch, with Washington Mutual, and with Wachovia, so why was the natural order not attended to? Simply put, Congress feels the need to contrive a crisis to seize more control of things they should not have control over. This was a power grab, as far as we are concerned, and in doing so they are using more of our money on what equates to bailout. We do not care what the critters in Congress say about the bill. They can shout from the rooftops that it is not a bailout but it is.

We see the frustration of the people now, and it is anything but contained. Because of this bill being passed so close to the election we can very easily see heads roll in Congress come election day. And we have no sympathy for them. The Democrats have had control of Congress since January of 2007, and they have done next-to-nothing. They still have yet to address the necessity for drilling our own oil; a pathway to energy independence. There are several appropriations bills waiting to be voted on -- no doubt loaded up with the same sort of pork/earmarks that we saw in the bailout bill.

It is disgusting to see how far the Congress has fallen. Were the Framers alive today, they would shake their heads and weep at how the nation has bastardized the Constitution, and they would curse those that enabled this to happen.

Marcie