Britney Hirras
Published: October 12, 2005
With the recent indictment of Republican leader Tom DeLay on charges of violating state campaign finance laws, the Republican Party approval rating has dropped even more. The current administration has become the scapegoat for a number of issues; America is back to its old ways of playing the blame game.
Sixty-one percent of Americans don’t approve of the direction the country is going, and only 40 percent approve of President Bush’s handling of current events.
What are Americans so unhappy with? The war in Iraq is a huge upset with many, as well as the handling of Hurricane Katrina and the rising gas prices.
But the problem is that hindsight is always 20-20. All of the issues that America so eagerly blames on the Republican Party are issues that cannot be solved with a simple decree or action. For example, President Bush cannot back out of Iraq now, or we’ll be (as will the Iraq people) in an even more serious situation. The absence of troops would cause utter chaos in the cities and pose even more of a threat to the surrounding countries. Experts have told us this repeatedly.
Bush’s Iraq policy is the only reasonable approach to the problem, because order must be instilled there and the Iraqi government must be stable and autonomous before America can safely pull out.
Hurricane Katrina, another favorite of the finger-pointers, is another multi-faceted issue that cannot be solved with a simple wave of the hand. The government is doing all it possibly can at this point. The handling of the disaster, admittedly rocky at first, was not a conspiracy against a certain race or the city of New Orleans but the result of poor leadership in the face of a wide-scale disaster. These leaders, including the ex-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have taken responsibility for their errors. President Bush and Congress have allotted billions of dollars to the relief effort, and through studies, are trying to perfect our disaster response so such miscalculations do not occur again.
Soaring gas prices, another common complaint, can hardly be blamed on one party or on one man. The Democrats are the ones who become incensed at the mention of drilling more oil wells in North America.
And Tom DeLay? For one thing, he is innocent until proven guilty, and who’s to say that this isn’t just another smear campaign? Yet despite Rep. Peter T. King’s (R-NY) remarks that he was indicted “because he was a majority leader” and that abandoning him would be synonymous to “abandoning ourselves,” some of DeLay’s fellow Republicans are allowing the indictment to dictate their own stance on the Republican Party. The policy of jumping ship when a fellow politician is in hot water is disgraceful. At least the president chose to praise DeLay’s leadership instead of playing politics like the rest of America is doing.
It seems to be the public’s favorite policy to scapegoat instead of solving problems, but the easiest route is finding is someone to blame. Unity, not squabbling, will help our nation get through these difficult times.