America, America, where forth art thou, America?

As if I, as a citizen, did not feel bad enough, I had to stumble upon this post by Raymond Learsy relating information about a Thomas Friedman article.

After watching the Mark-Up performances on the HealthCare Bill this morning and concluding Sen. Grassley and Baucus are your old fashioned “wind-bags”, and reading articles and seeing on Cooper Anderson 360 the reasons why we don’t want Gadaffi in our country and hearing Tea Baggers are still doing their thing and reading about the deification of Glenn Beck and other important(?) issues that should concern us American citizens and finally ending up with the Learsy post cited below can hardly be consider a light at the end of the tunnel for my day.

The only thing that keeps rattlin’ in my head is the quote: “If you want to keep a man in the gutter, you have to get down into the gutter with him and hold him there.”

I suspect just understanding the shit that is going on in this country is the light at the end of the tunnel I need, because everything is now beginning to get on my MF nerves!!

Tom Friedman's Take On "Wimps" and "The Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys"
Excerpt:
France, has a government with vision, having the welfare of the general public foremost in its sights. Examples of its accomplishments in recent years has not only been a uniquely efficient power grid, but according to the World Heath Organization, France is first in the WHO's ranking of world health systems. This while the United States lingers 37th in ranking. (Behind, with apologies, such countries as Malta, Morocco, Colombia, Cyprus, Costa Rica, and on. I'm sure you get the drift.)

And
But in making this broad brush judgment a key point is lost. The issue doesn't simply attain to limiting fossil fuel consumption by significantly increasing gasoline taxes, as Friedman suggests. It attains to something much more fundamental. France's governance emanates from an elite corp of public servants, graduates of the "grands ecoles" who run the sinews of the Ministries of State. It has given France a government whose dedication and commitment to the general weal is keenly suited to a fiercely competitive world. Ours, by contrast is progressively dysfunctional, where the electorate has become increasingly powerless, neutered by moneyed and narrow constituencies whose parochial interests are served by an increasingly token government molded to do their bidding and override the general good with growing abandon.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/tfriedmans-take-on-wimps_b_294370.html

As always,
BB
P.S. I have never heard of “Cheese eating monkeys” before. Is this a metaphor about Blacks? Those neo-con racists always have to have something in order to get Brownie points with their peers.