Feeling Rather Unstimulated

After taking office in 1981, President Reagan made an immediate push to honor the tax cuts he promised during his campaign. The nation was mired in a steep recession at the time, which was not the least of his worries, at least when compared to the Democratic congressional majority he had to convince to play along nicely with.

Reagan's tax cuts passed with the help of forty-eight Democratic votes in the House, and thirty-seven Democratic yays in the Senate. The plan was enacted effective that spring and Reagan celebrated an early bi-partisan victory.

When President Obama took office last month, he was poised to usher in a new era of friendly government decorum, the kind where divisiveness would be cut through, and a cozy group hug would emerge.

Not so fast.

President Obama is celebrating victory in the passing of the massive stimulus package, an accord brokered by a hold-the-party line Congress before limping to the White House for the President's signature. After weeks of meetings and clandestine back room negotiations with Republican members of Congress, the President garnered zero votes in the House and just three in the Senate, or just enough to escape the prospect of ugly dramatics of a Senate filibuster.

Hope took a few right jabs to the nose, and change was left staggering and woozy, TKO'd by the partisan beltway machine.

This doesn't feel like a stimulus to me. Come to think of it, I don't feel stimulated at all. In fact, it smacks of a sort of awkward foreplay that ends up ruining the mood and making me want to conjure an excuse to pack up, go home and pretend it all never happened.

The stimulus reeks of bad pork and typical government waste. If garbage goes in, garbage must come out, I suspect. This is no New Deal, gang. It's an insult to FDR to even suggest that this is remotely similar.

If I brought the stimulus bill with me to my proctologists office, the doctor would stick his finger in it. That's how stinky it is.

Now it's time for all of us to roll up our sleeves, get to work and see if the stimulus works. These things take several years to play out, despite the gloom and doom that cable news and talk radio suggest is imminent.

As for Reagan and his tax cuts, history shows mixed results. The separate realities of the left and right have vastly different opinions of its effectiveness.

And President Obama's stimulus? I'll hold my strongest disdain after the completion of the bullet train that will be built between Disneyland and Las Vegas, a project made possible by the stimulus package and courtesy of Senate Majority Leader, Nevada Senator Harry Reid.

It would be only appropriate that Disney's Goofy take the lead in the ground-breaking ceremonies.