The post's title is probably my favorite Thomas Paine quote. It enjoyed new life and widely came into the public consciousness as a commercial tagline when Lee Iacocca was running Chrysler. It's certainly much more elegant than its modern counterpart, which because of its crudeness I won't repeat here, but suffice it to say that it rhymes with "knit or get off the cot." Paine's words should be a bare minimum standard for any elected official, and failure to adhere to them should automatically disqualify him or her for re-election. If this standard were applied, the sad and shameful truth is that a lot of familiar faces on Capitol Hill would disappear.
Let's get a couple of things straight. First, simply obstructing the problem solving efforts of others while offering little or nothing in the way of your own solutions is not to be celebrated as dissent or the sort of checks and balances the Constitution envisioned. The Monty Python crew understood this when they pointed out the following distinction, "Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes." If you're only capable of offering the equivalent of contradiction and not a compelling argument, then we neither need nor want your input and we'll let those with something of value to add carry the day. Far too many in both chambers of Congress, especially the Senate, are failing to do the job for which they're accepting a paycheck. In many cases, if they practiced law the way they practice lawmaking they would be disbarred.
Secondly, the world is an imperfect place and, thus, simply finding fault with someone else's plan means nothing. With respect to health care reform, for instance, every proposal has its own set of problems and doing nothing at all would eventually be catastrophic. You add absolutely nothing to the dialogue if you only point out costs or other shortcomings without demonstrating that your idea, loss for loss, is better overall.
Finally, this should apply not only to lawmakers but also to the general marketplace of ideas. My patience with those who offer nothing but negativity has been exhausted. I could eventually bankrupt someone who took the following bet, turn on Rush Limbaugh at a random point during his show. If he's saying anything positive about right wing politics or anything else, I owe you $20; if he's simply spewing venom, you owe me $1. I recently posted a piece about our demons and better angels. Rush's world is composed almost exclusively of demons. He is to anger and hatred what Richard Simmons is to exercise for the corpulent elderly - no one works harder to promote it. I'm also out of patience with Obama haters. Predictably, the people beaming with schadenfreude when Obama failed to secure the Olympics for Chicago claimed last week that he didn't have the international star power people thought he had. Today those same people are fuming that he was awarded the Nobel peace prize solely because he has international star power! They don't care that they're vulnerable to the form shattering question, were you lying then or are you lying now? All that matters is that they get to hate, mock and scorn.
