On Bailouts....

Man oh man. What I could say about bailouts. Probably nothing you haven’t heard already but maybe it is time to get rid of the big words and just call it what it is. Here is my analogy. You and a complete stranger are in a boat. You are thirty feet from shore in sixty feet of water. You both have shotguns. Someone has painted a bulls-eye with words shoot here in the bottom of the boat right in the middle. Now you both know that the right thing to do is not to shoot a hole in the boat. Now the complete stranger fire two rounds of buckshot right through the center of the bulls-eye and the boat starts to sink. Now, here is the real meat of the whole thing. You acted responsibly, you didn’t shoot, the boat is sinking and no matter what you do it is going to sink because once its starts it isn’t going to stop till it’s on the bottom. Do you A. Wait for someone else to come along and save you. B. Swim ashore and save yourself because you don’t know this person and they are the ones that acted without responsibility anyway. C. Bail out a boat that is going to sink anyway because the person in the boat who caused all of this isn’t going to pitch in and help. We gave billions to the car industry, they are filing bankruptcy, we give billions to finance companies and they gave bonuses and took vacations. Now everyone wonders why all this is happening. I know why. Here it is. In this country we have chosen a mentality that first place second place and third place…is the same thing. Folks, there has to be a winner. There has to be a loser. This mentality that everyone who participates gets a trophy is killing us all. We reward failure with ribbons, trophies, and billions. We reward non-performance with vacations and bonuses. I saw a kid with a ninth place ribbon the other day. Remember the days when if you didn’t win you didn’t get a trophy. The days when if you didn’t do your job you got fired? What if the Olympics said that everyone who participated got a medal? There is a harsh reality. Not everybody wins. We reward non performance, and those that succeed are rarely heard about unless they are riding a bike or running a football. Folks: failure builds character. If you lose it makes you feel bad and you don’t like feeling bad, so you try harder and harder until you win and then you feel good, and you like feeling good so you win again and again. We rewarded a President that was not performing with a second term just because he scared us into thinking we were all going to die in some terrorist cataclysm if we didn’t. Are we safer? Do you feel safer? Or do you feel broke and homeless. Yeah homeless is safer. I have always believed that.