The Leadership Vacuum

The old saying goes, " As Rome burns, Nero dances" or something like that. Don't be mistaken I am not comparing President Obama to Nero; rather I am comparing the entire leadership of the United States to Nero. For over two decades our elected officials have failed us. The trouble is that we Americans have enabled this failure through our apathy and lack of demand to vetting our leaders.

One has to go back to President Truman to get our last true leader that actually meant it when saying, "The buck stops here." In the White House we have the American version of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. But our King Louis is years in the coming so no one should be surprised. We haven't voted for Statesmen for decades; rather our politicians have been able to skate by without addressing the tough issues and being properly vetted. Minnesotans saw that last year when the Legislature, again, kicked the can down the road instead of dealing with the tough realities that face the State.

Thankfully the small town I live in and the Council I am apart of understands that we cannot rely on handouts to fund our government and that if we want to grow we all must share in the pain. Here we all sit watching United States embassies burn and KYC restaurants being attacked. What did KYC ever do? Don't they employ people in the country they are in?

Instead of sending a stern message, words are not stern in my book, the current administration first apologized for the film that apparently started it all. The attacks on our embassies and bomb threats on US campuses are not a response to some YouTube video that has been on YouTube for several months. It is a result of the Arab Spring that our current leadership thought was a great Democracy movement. The Arab Spring was a guise to put in power those factions in the world that want to see the destruction of the West.

We need leadership. We need a Statesman. Are we capable in America anymore to vote for a person that is capable of making the tough decision even if it's unpopular and may not get re-elected for that or will we stay in our camps and blindly vote D or R?

Al Jazeera “Real News”

Yesterday United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed, "Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners." Because viewership is up that translates to "real news"? Many, here on the blog and elsewhere, rail against Fox News for their fabrications and stretching of the truth. If viewership is the prerequisite of "real news" then Fox News would trump them all.

Perhaps Secretary Clinton should look to the recent Census Bureau report that counted nearly 1.2 million Arabs in 2000; 860,000 in 1990; and 610,000 in 1980. Combine the rising Arab population with the increase uses of the internet and it is reasonable to conclude that increased viewership is driven by other factors unrelated to "real news". Or did CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News change their programming similar to what MTV did when they moved from music videos to reality television shows? I figured Secretary Clinton to be smarter than this. Then again she may be taking a shot at the liberal media outlets for their lack of vetting and holy alliance with Obama during the Democratic Primary and the 2010 Presidential campaign. Either way, if Al Jazeera is being considered as a "real" news source by the Obama Administration over the outlets here in the United States does make one ponder…….