BY RUSSELL TURNER
WINNING HANDS AND JOKERS
I know a lot of people that enjoy playing the game of poker. As for myself, I rarely ever play any game of chance; I have found that I am better off and save a lot of time to just give the other players my money up front, because in the end they would end up with it anyhow. Politics can be a whole lot like poker, before the election the candidates like to deal out a bunch of cards to the voters in the mail. All of us have received the usual glossy post cards that, regardless of which candidate sends them out, will have the usual clichés about being for the children, the elderly, etc... Too many times the voters are convinced that they have a winning hand in the candidate they select; unfortunately many times we get a joker instead. We have gotten into a system where the better candidates many times don’t win, the elections have become more of a system of which candidate can have the best marketing strategy.
If you are in a card game and one player who seldom has a winning hand continually likes to bluff, after a few hands you begin to see the pattern; it is time to start calling his bluff. In a card game sooner or later you have to lay the cards on the table; too many times in politics we are not holding our elected officials accountable, but are letting them bluff us. Being a conservative, I value the conservative principles above most other qualifications a candidate claims that he or she has. I have found that many of the clichés that we see on so many of the cards that we receive in the mail are about as valid as a deed to some ocean front property in Arizona. Too many times we voters think that our job is done when the election is over and our candidate has won. In reality our job has just begun.
It is our job to hold our elected officials’ feet to the fire. Many people don’t like to be bothered with what goes on in Oklahoma City or Washington DC. The cold hard facts are very simple, what goes on in those two cities directly affects all of us. For far too long our government has encouraged segments of our society to make government entitlements their careers. I guess it could be said that we all have skin in the game whether you earn your money or if it is given to you by the government. Being from the small business sector, I see our current system cannot and will not continue. The 20 trillion dollar national debt and the unfunded liabilities nearing 200 trillion dollars will completely destroy our financial system. We voters have elected many so-called conservatives, but we have not seen a slowdown in the size and scope of government or a reduction of the national debt. We all need to remind ourselves that every individual in our society deserves the same representation as the next person. We have too many jokers that are wild, and we Americans are the ones with the losing hands.
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