What Do You Say to a Mocus?

Growing up in the military we used abbreviations for everything: ?Going TDY to CONUS,? (tee-dee-WY to KO-nuhs) or ?He?s assigned to USARPAC Headquarters? (YOO-sar-pack). And then as the federal government grew like King Kong, the feds took on the imperial catch phrase lingo too. Nowadays jargon for the Supreme Court is SCOTUS (SKO-tus) and the President of the United States naturally is POTUS (PO-tuhs). I guess that makes a Member of Congress, United States a MOCUS, which can be pronounced either MOCK-US or, more slyly, mo?-CUSS, but neither one seems very polite. Are they mocking us the voters, or cussing us, or is it the other way around? Be that as it may, the mocus migrates occasionally back to its original district (when not on foreign junkets) and seeks belated congress with the home herd, called ?touching base.?

Touching base gives us domestic home herds a splendid opportunity to talk with our own particular MOCUS, but what do you say? The MOCUS has a disconcerting way of answering uncomfortable questions with a non-answer or sliding by a knotty problem about which he/she is totally ignorant with a bunch of gobbledegook. But this year, enough is enough. It may take some extra effort on your part, meaning you?ll have to do a little research on, for example, voting records and what they mean, but it?s not too hard if you go to Project Vote Smart and find out just what your mocus has really been doing, in contrast to what he/she says to the base when back home.

As for me, the last time my Congressman and I were face to face there were some things I thought he absolutely had to hear, given my disgust and disappointment of late. Other citizens can come up with their own lists, but here are some of the points I made, and some I wish I?d made, and some things I intend to say in the future. In the voting booth, perhaps:

1) Please do not keep telling me to be afraid and to remember how 9/11 ?changed everything.? You do it every time some one objects to something the President does--- you jerk my chain. I really am not likely to forget 9/11; I ?m an adult, I can deal with bad news, and don?t insult
me by treating me like a child? or like a sheep so you and your best buddies can fleece me, say, at the gas pump, or of my constitutional liberties under the guise of protecting me. You do not take a free people to war by telling them to be afraid.

2) When I consider Washington as a whole, I am fed up with the shenanigans going on at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. It seems as though every day we turn over another rock and some Senator or Congressman crawls out to reveal that he has sold America down the river to various parasitical vermin by letting big corporations actually write self-serving legislation for the rest of the country, by giving tax cuts and favors to major Republican campaign contributors, by approving the appointment of official watchdogs from the very groups or industries they?re supposed to be regulating? and by selling their votes and favors to the highest bidder.

3) Then I look at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and what do I see? I see an incompetent President who never takes responsibility for any difficulty much less a mistake, who spends almost as much time on photo ops as on vacation, and who acts as though he is not subject to
any laws at all if he finds them inconvenient as he goes about supposedly defending us.

4) I see a President who has surrounded himself with lapdog lawyers who parse the law for him and split hairs until the law is reduced to shreds, all so he can comfortably order torture, throw anybody he chooses into secret prisons and keep them there without due process and without telling anybody at all, a President who secretly orders massive spying and wiretaps on his fellow Americans without seeking easily obtained warrants (and with remarkably little helpful results), and who repeatedly renders suspects into the hands of foreign authorities for even harsher treatment.

5) I see a President whose arrogance is exceeded only by his ignorance , inducing him to blunder into an unnecessary aggressive war without planning more than one move ahead, diverting our resources from capturing and punishing those criminals responsible for 9/11, alienating allies and multiplying our enemies, creating ever more terrorists instead of solving the problem. He made a massive strategic error, and will not admit it--- he and his cohorts ruthlessly punish any who raise their heads from adulation to register a doubt.

6) I see an Administration that has squandered national resources, ignored the energy crisis until we?re almost behind the power curve, played havoc with the health care and retirement of our seniors, saddled our children and grandchildren with incredible deficits, debased our currency, made the rich grow vastly richer while the middle classes become ever poorer, and then masked all this with phony statistics and platitudes.

7) And finally, I am saddened to see a President who has enshrined the dogma and prejudices of one particular religious sect as if it were the officially established religion of the land.

In other words, I see that the entire current national government is subtly but effectively, through fear and threats and midnight legislation, destroying our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our tri-partite system of checks and balances, and ruining our economy in more ways than we have yet to understand. I feel betrayed, and very angry.

Did we not fight a Revolution against these very things over two hundred and thirty years ago?

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