The Others (re-edited)

In an article about the impasse over extending unemployment benefits, one source describes the conflict in Congress this way: "Democrats argue cutting those benefits would hurt the economic recovery. Others argue extending the benefits will provide a bigger incentive for unemployed to remain without a job."

Others argue? Others? Why, who be these mysterious unnamed forces gathering in opposition to the hordes of lazy people living like kings on $300 bucks a week on the government dime? They are Republicans like Jon Kyl, pictured here, of course. Kyl took heat earlier this year for accusing those collecting unemployment of being happy with their situation.

At first I was discouraged with the so-called liberal media for being too afraid to call the culprits of this gridlock by name, but then I warmed to the idea of referring to them as "others" because it accurately portrays them as the detached enigmas that they are. Nothing demonstrates their vast lack of connection from America like this issue and others like it.

It's no wonder how Kyl and his Other colleagues even end up in office. It would be intuitive to assume that people with so much antipathy for the average American could never be elected executioner. Our elected officials are put in office to look after our best interests and if they don't we can remove them. That is the intuitive way of looking at it, but here is what really happens: Kyl and the Others are so appealing to so many because of their allegiance to the wealthy and powerful. If you give people in America the choice between the well-heeled and the underdog, they will go with the well-heeled. Even through their part-time resentment, the underdog is agog with the barons because the rich have the things the rest of us want. In other words we all want to be rich.

The downside is that the wealthy and powerful are not samely in awe with the average American. The privileged use the admiration of the average American to elect the Others to do their bidding. Once elected, the Others give all of their attention to the wealthy and powerful while keeping the workaday headaches at arm's length. And should the rabble find themselves in any sort of peril, the Others essentially blame the victim for their problems, that is, when they aren't using the average American's problems as a cause to blame Barack Obama. Jon Kyl and Others like him can't even hide their contempt for the underdog. Kyl's misspeak earlier this year was leftover ramble from the welfare debate. Now that welfare reform has come and gone the Others are hungry for someone else to openly malign. Why not the unemployed?

What remedies Kyl and the Others do have for the currently unemployed are really handouts for the wealthy and powerful. What the unemployed need, they say, is more tax cuts. By their logic tax cuts not only puts a few hundred bucks in the average American's pockets but gives multimillionaires and billionaires huge windfalls. The wealthy will then turn around and out of the kindness of their hearts create more jobs for the unemployed. This is clearly an agreement the Others have formed with the wealthy on the trust system. There is clearly no obligation or promise whatsoever on the part of the wealthy to honor this little arrangement. The wealthy certainly did not uphold their end of the bargain enough prevent the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

Yet in spite of the failure of their tax cut theory the Others continue to pursue the same tack while expecting a different outcome. They are adamantly opposed to extending additional funds so laid off engineers and firemen, and cops, and teachers can keep their houses while they insist the most important economic order of the day is to get billionaires more money back in April. Again with that?

An intuitive thinker would guess that the Others would have short political lives for their abandonment of the average American, but the intuitive thinker would be wrong. In the face of tough times, the average American just elected the Others to a majority in the House of Representatives. Yes. The average American was angry at the party who supported emergency relief for average Americans so they elected the Other party who vowed to do nothing but oppose the current president and extend billionaire tax cuts.

Today my dog saw a container of standing water outside and began drinking from it before I stopped him. Every few minutes he would go back to drink more before I had the sense to dump it out. Now I'm not not saying that some people are as dumb as my dog, but, in the words of Bart Simpson, I don't know how to finish that sentence.