Political Musings-Focus on Our Senate

How fortunate we all are to live in a democracy (ok, a representative republic) where our views and concerns are defended by people we elect in three branches of a government forming a system of checks and balances widely considered to be the best political system ever developed.

The proof of how grand our system is can be found in the US Senate. First the lighthearted subject matter:

Kentucky senator Jim Bunning and Arizona senator John McCain are both pushing for Congress to force a tougher steroid policy on Major League Baseball.

My fellow Kentuckians and I know the Republican Bunning as being baseball Hall of Famer and an old whacko who is off his rocker. He provided some levity to last year's senate race when he commented that his opponent, Dr. Dan Mangiardo, looked too much like a terrorist. That gave us something to laugh about because it showed how whacko Bunning had become and made the race MUCH tighter than it would have been otherwise.

John McCain is much more respectable however. McCain we all know as the former POW who is a popular moderate republican, liked generally by both sides of the aisle and considered to be very reasonable. Thus making McCain and Bunning an Odd Couple of Republicans.

Regardless of the motives or respectability of these two men, they have no business telling baseball how to conduct its day to day affairs. We all hate steroids in sports. We all hate inflated numbers and Barry Bonds love affair with BALCo. But what most of hate more is goverment regulating every aspect of human existence. Freedom slips away when government controls everything in some capacity.

Now to the heavier subject matter. Yesterday Democrat blowhard Harry Reid felt the need to make a complete fool of himself and demand the Senate enter into a rare closed session to debate the reasons for going to the Iraq war.

I've said many times before that Congress has no beef here. Whether or not Bush lied is almost beside the point. It is the duty, in this system of checks and balances, of the Congress to declare war, and thus it is the duty of the Congress to determine if a declaration of war is justified. In plainer terms, the Congress should have been trying to verify or disprove Bush's claims BEFORE we declared war, not after the fact. It's too late now.

Further, Democrats are basing this latest Bush bash on testimony from Joe Wilson, who had his own vendetta against Bush just after the Iraq war began. Wilson's statements in front of the National Press Club the other day stated that Saddam Hussein never bought Uranium from Niger because if he had, Wilson would have seen the evidence of that money in a very indigent country. Of course, Bush never said Hussein bought uranium in those infamous sixteen words of his State of the Union address, he said Hussein had tried. And beyond that, that information came from British intelligence. Intelligence that Britain has never backed off of.

So what's the point in all this grandstanding? Simple. It's what politics has been reduced to in these modern times. Its grown men barking at each other like WWE stars in their pre-fight interviews. It's a heavy weight weigh-in and press conference and the boxers are Reid (flanked as always by Chuck Schumer) and Republican Bill Frist. It's petty and frankly, most people don't care.

Congress is wasting more and more tax payer time and money with both of these. One is kind of funny and light hearted. The other is serious and grave, but much too late in coming. We're lucky to live where we do, but how long is our luck going to hold out?