The Year Lunacy Obscured the Sanity in Front of Us

My fellow Editors (click here, or just see below) are profoundly pessimistic about the current and future state of the union. Not for the first time, I find myself in disagreement.

To begin at the beginning: I sat down to write this morning with the unoriginal idea of doing a year-end wrap of the political accomplishments of 2010. It was never going to be revelatory — but it was instructive. Because despite record-breaking obstruction in Congress (91 GOP filibuster attempts this year alone), much got done. There is, of course, the bill Everyone Has Been Talking About: the passage of health-care reform. But there are many, many others that haven't gotten nearly the attention they would have in better economic times and less divisive electoral ones. Pay-As-You-Go was reenacted after an eight-year hiatus under the Bush-Republican Congress regime. Major banking reforms limiting the behaviors that led to the current recession were signed into law. The government stopped paying private banks to give out student loans and will instead issue those loans directly, at significant savings to taxpayers and to students. The shockingly unjust disparity between sentencing for cocaine and crack crimes was significantly reduced — though not eliminated. It is now impossible for foreign courts to enforce libel claims against Americans that violate our own, magnificently broad First Amendment understanding of libel law. Schools are now required to feed children healthier meals. Shortly, gay Americans will no longer be able to be fired from the military simply for being gay, and their beloveds will be able to give them support and comfort openly, just as straight beloveds have always been allowed to do. Upon Russia's impending ratification of the New START treaty, our inspectors will once again be given access to Russian nuclear stockpiles to assess their security, deployment, and maintenance. And for good and ill, everyone's taxes remain at the Bush levels.

And all this, again, despite unprecedented obstructionism by the minority party. Or, I should say, the former minority party...

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/2010-lunacy-obscures-sanity?src=rss

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