Leadership Failure: The Special Needs Child

There was an article on the BBC website the other day about British school kids. It reads a lot like our nation’s current leadership mess. Turns out, many of the kids are mislabeled as “special needs” when all they really need is a little discipline. But, it’s much easier for their teachers to neutralize their unruliness by pushing them right into special ed. Make the little darlings someone else’s problem – and at a high monetary cost, to boot, but, then, someone else is also footing the bill.

Sound familiar? Just do a little role reassignment. Us for the British teachers. Our politicians for the school kids. And our own children for the “someone else” stuck with the problem and the bill. What it adds up to is this. Our politicians are running amok, creating all kinds of problems. They’ll say anything to get elected and do what they want once in office. They spend money like it’s being printed in the backroom. They have us wrapped so tightly in regulations we look like a bunch of stand-ins for Boris Karloff in his old mummy movies. And, boy, are politicians in love with the blame game and the name-calling. Anything to distract from the facts.

Our solution? Don’t handle the problem ourselves, of course, because that’s hard. Just allow politicians to behave badly, as long as it doesn’t effect us, at least, not a whole lot. We’ll be dead soon enough anyhow. How bad can it get before then? Besides, we’re so used to political shenanigans we’ve become jaded. In fact, we expect outrageous. The worse they get, the more we tolerate. Doesn’t everyone know by now that insufferable self-interest and the requisite dishonesty are the special needs of the political child? Lucky for us the prevailing winds are in our favor, blowing the fallout onto future generations. So what if our kids end up paying for our lapses their entire lives?

Make no mistake about it. The mistakes are ours. We own them. Like the move to Crushing Debt Lane, which is happening right now, on our watch, and we’re letting it. So things will continue as long as we’re content to let politicians work for themselves and then fib their way to re-election. We aren’t doing our part until we understand the facts and start passing out responsibility rather than handing politicians a pass. This doesn’t mean listening to the evening news. It means doing our own research. If we can say “Google”, we can find the answers ourselves.

Here are a couple of search areas you might find interesting. Obama’s out campaigning in the trenches, trying to nail Republicans for everything that’s wrong while he takes credit for everything that’s right. (Sounds like a mental disorder but that’s a subject for a different blog.) Who is he kidding? He’s had his way with our economy for the past 20 months. In fact, almost all of his major agenda items are now law. And, the Candidate of Bipartisanship has pushed everything through in a strictly partisan way. Democrat-only wheels and deals. Republicans need not apply. So, why is Obama now blaming House Minority Leader John Boehner for the ills of our day? Why the caustic personal attacks? The demonizing? He needs another Sarah “Patsy” Palin to kick around this go round. Anything to take the focus off his failings.

Then there’s the revisionist spin Obama’s economic “experts” are trying to give Biden’s Summer of Recovery hype of last spring. They’re now saying Biden meant infrastructure projects not jobs. Wow. That whopper is so huge Burger King must be envious. Joe toured the Country crowing about the addition of at least 750,000 jobs this summer. Instead, we lost jobs. So much for his crystal ball on the economy. No wonder Christina Romer quit. If she had to spin Biden’s hot air like that she would have been hard pressed to show her face in a University classroom again.

There are many other examples. Like, increasing taxes in a recession is a smart move or government knows better than business how to fix the economy. Take your pick of claims to examine. Or you could just pass the Obama-buck to your kids.

See you on the left-side.