George Bernard Shaw had it right when he said: “We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”
We have recently seen crazy political brinkmanship in Washington surrounding the gravity-defying U.S. debt ceiling; then economic uncertainties and credit rating downgrades in the U.S. and Europe causing wild swings in all stock markets.
England shocked the world with several days and nights of mindless riots by mainly disaffected youngsters. Then there’s the terrible famine in the Horn Of Africa and ongoing religious and political strife in places like Libya, Syria and Afghanistan.
It may be tempting to turn off the news channels, but that’s never an option for news-nuts like me, and there are bright spots if you look hard enough.
One came from our Prime Minister who reportedly locked himself in a bathroom in Brazil during a dispute about when toasts were to be made at the function he was attending. Of course, his spin-doctors in the PMO denied the story, being quoted as saying that Mr. Harper was in the bathroom for “regular reasons.”
Then there’s a bright spot from Texas, where their evangelical-jihadist Governor is about to declare a run for the White House. Nobody can forget the havoc wreaked around the globe when another Texas Governor occupied the Oval Office during the first eight years of this millennium.
Rick Perry has already been described as “Bush without the brains” and “all hat but no cattle,” that alone guarantees that political news will never be dull.
Another bright spot came when Elections BC revealed that there were over 1.6 million ballots mailed in during the HST referendum.
Being held in summer, and during a postal strike, it was a decidedly higher number than Christy Clark’s government expected. Yet this exercise in direct democracy has achieved something that has been utterly unattainable for the last two years; it has the pro-HST and anti-HST sides saying exactly the same thing. Both are claiming that the 52 per cent turnout means their side will win.
Stay tuned for the final count at the end of August.
Bernie Smith
Parksville