I'm sure this Gail Collins believes everything she says in her article. I mean, she wrote it and she seems to be filled with just the right amount of self-righteousness required to do something like this, however, she's a liberal sheep.
As I read the article, I'm guessing written to inflame those reading it, filled with what is supposed to be numerous reasons WHY we shouldn't vote for John McCain, I was more and more positive it was he I was going to choose come election day.
Here are some of the high points:
- The theme for his mortgage speech this week was basically McCain to Homeowners: Drop Dead. It was, he said sternly, “not the duty of the government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly.” The good news, he noted, was that out of 80 million American homeowners, only 4 million are in the tank, while everybody else is “working a second job, skipping a vacation and managing their budgets” the way Countrywide Financial intended them to.
Really? What a concept, taking responsibility for your actions. I mean, my husband and I have a mortgage. I became ill and couldn't work. We got behind on our mortgage payment and borrowed against his retirement account through his work to catch it up. We're paying it back, little by little, but we took responsibility for our own mortgage and didn't ask anyone for help to solve the problem. We were literally on the verge of bankruptcy and we are fighting back all by ourselves. It never OCCURRED to me to ask anyone for help. On the same page of the "opinion" piece is a link to an article with the headline, "Clinton Calls for $30 Billion for Home Mortgage Crisis". Huh, imagine that... What are the odds a Democrat would call for the American people to take financial responsibility for the rest of the country, people who made an irresponsible decision to take out a mortgage they couldn't afford only to fail against it later? - He did, however, leave the door open for some vague, amorphous, undefined aid to good homeowners, as opposed to irresponsible ones who ... did something irresponsible. Like taking that vacation.
WOW, this one REALLY throws me. Gail Collins almost sounds angry that the people having a financial crisis, losing their homes because of their inability to pay their mortgage payments, should be permitted to show MORE financial irresponsibility by taking a vacation, almost as if it's their due. My husband and I haven't taken a vacation in years! Mark works for a government contractor and his vacations are traveling with work around the country. My son and I went to Colorado last October but it was so I could do an article on Cripple Creek (read: a WORKING vacation). Not only do we not have the money to take a vacation, we don't have the time. Believe me when I tell you, this is a hard one for me because I LOVE to travel around the country. I LOVE to see the beauty that makes up the United States. All I have to say on this one is this: Based on Gail's viewpoint, these people may lose their homes due to the heartlessness of the government but at least they'll have a nice tan while they live in a cardboard box. Geez, the stupidity of this argument... - McCain then suggested that the federal government ought to do something about getting regulations off the back of the financial markets and concluded with a call to reduce the corporate tax rate. It was not exactly a rallying cry for the masses.
Didn't Reagan prove in the 80's that the "trickle-down" theory actually worked? Didn't the 80's show greater financial gains for the common man? If the corporations are making more money, they're creating more jobs with better pay and they are taking better care of the ones they already have. Why do Democrats cling so tenaciously to the idea that we all need to be poor, eating cat food, in order to be good Americans? I have a truly hard time buying into that every time I see Hillary in one of her Chanel suits with her $500 haircut and "God knows how much she paid" makeup. Every time I look at the aforementioned headline where Hillary wants $30 BILLION dollars to bail out the mortgage companies I almost palpitate. I know my soul dies a little bit. $30 BILLION!!!!!!!!!!!! That's more than Wal-Mart makes in a year, isn't it? Tax and spend, tax and spend... you gotta love Dems for that. At least they stay true to themselves as the decades pass one into the other. - McCain also favors privatizing parts of the Social Security system, an idea so deeply unpopular with actual people that it never flew in Congress, even when the Republicans were in control and the nation had not yet deduced that the president was permanently out to lunch.
Hmmmm, since when is it unpopular with the people? Maybe it's unpopular with Gail and her crowd, you know, the ones who go to the Russian Tea Room for lunch and spend about $50 a person each time they do it. With the common folk, the ones who eat bologna sandwiches for lunch because that's what they can afford (okay, maybe a bag of chips so they can say, "All that and a bag of chips") WANT Social Security privatized; not just some of it but ALL of it. In the 70's, Dems made Social Security their private slush fund and the result is the quagmire we have now. The EASY fix for Social Security is to take it out of the General Fund again and allow it to be a self-standing, self-sufficient fund that it once was. Oh, no, the Dems can't have billions of dollars taken away from them for the good of the common man! Why, they might not NEED the government to take care of them in their old age. They might *GASP* be able to take care of themselves! I say if anyone is out to lunch, it's Gail Collins. Her liberalism is almost suffocating it's so thick. - And at bottom, his economic vision makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. He’s going to keep the Bush tax cuts, continue our $3-trillion-and-counting war in Iraq and decrease corporate taxes. And how is he going to pay for it? By getting rid of pork-barrel earmarks. And I am planning to remodel my house by purchasing a tube of Elmer’s glue.
WHAT?!?!?! Get rid of pork-barrel earmarks? Why that's just crazy talk! How DARE a president want to do away with pork-barrel politics! My friend Gail here asks how McCain will pay for his "economic vision". How about NOT bailing out the sub-prime mortgage lenders and using the $30 BILLION Hillary asked for? A good site for finding out just what our Democrats are up to, why they don't want to do away with pork-barrel earmarks, visit The Pork Page. Now, I don't want to mislead you... Republicans are just as guilty of this as are the Dems but it's a REPUBLICAN asking to do away with it. - But give the man credit for telling it like he thinks it is. So far, he’s only alienated the homeowners, retirees and vacation-takers.
Um, let's see. I own a home and he hasn't alienated me. I agree homeowners should be responsible for their actions. My husband is a military retiree and in a short 20 years or so we should be considered actual retirees. I'm not offended that I should take care of myself. That's our goal, to not rely on the government to take care of us in our golden years. We also used to be called vacation-takers and while it bothers me we can't take vacations like we once did I also realize we're doing what we need to do and sacrificing what we need to sacrifice in order to take care of our business. Not alienated there either because this isn't a forever kind of thing. So if I fall into two of the three groups and I'm not alienated, and I can be considered pretty average, then who's Gail talking about really?
Okay, I guess I've exhausted this subject enough. The bottom line, for me, is this: I was lukewarm about John McCain before reading this article but now I support him more. He's financially conservative (read: he wants to reduce government spending) and he believes people should take care of himself. Now if he can just come out against amnesty he'd be the perfect candidate.
But who am I? This is just my two cents...
