Sanity means Responsibility

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." -- Ben Franklin "When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday -- no matter what happened Tuesday." --Stephen Colbert I was listening to Mike Malloy's poetically articulate harangues on the radio the other day, and I kind of had an epiphany (listening to Malloy tends to do that). He argued that Bush had to be insane -- how else could you say that your belligerent Iran policy hasn't changed when the NIE report definitively says they stopped their nuclear weapons program in 2003? And of course, he's right. No sane person would do that. And this country is just as crazy as he is if we let him get away with it. What defines this presidency, his administration, and my congressional representive (who just happens to be speaker of the house)? A total lack of responsiblitity. And by responsibility I mean just that, the ability to respond. Whether or not you attribute it to incompetence, corruption, or pure evil -- you have to admit when two planes hit the twin towers and you just sit there reading about goats, when a hurricane wipes out a major American city and you go have birthday cake with John McCain, when you refuse to listen to intelligence reports, military experts and the general public and push on with a quagmire that had no justification in the first place, it shows a definite lack of ability to respond. Nancy Pelosi acts like she couldn't care less about what her constituents think -- in the 2006 election, 60% of San Franciscans voted for it to be city policy to call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. You have to wonder what the percentage would be now, especially for Cheney alone. Now new revelations have shown that as early as 2002 Pelosi "... was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk...." including waterboarding [ http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2004061384_tapes09.html ]. Yet Pelosi said nothing, and she still insists that "impeachment is off the table." She hasn't held a public town-hall meeting since January 2006. That's not responsive government! If you stop and think about it, our whole nation has reverted into a mass of irresponsible clods, accountable to neither themselves, other countries, or planet Earth herself. That's the definition of insanity, my friends. How do we take back our sanity? First by acknowledging our own responsibiliy, to ourselves and others (and I'm including myself here!). Sanity begins by holding ourselves accountable, and changing our behavior when we finally accept the truth.