It’s Good Enough For Government Work!

By Kevin Joseph Tull

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When I was in the Army there was a saying, “It’s good enough for government work.” This saying has been around for quite awhile, but of course you will probably rarely if ever hear it from a politician. Well, unless that politician is proposing more government to fix the problems caused by those government agencies that believe that “it’s good enough for government work.”

Strangely, the voters love to hear of a reformer politician that will solve all the ills of government by spending more money on the problem and calling for more government oversight.

How come most people don’t see the absurdity of these types of proposed solutions to government caused problems. Certainly no one suggests the problem with organized crime is that it needs more money and bigger gangsters to solve the problems of organized crime. To prevent murder and theft we don’t propose to have more murderers and thieves loose on the street killing and robbing more people to reduce the damaging effects of murder and theft. Would anyone propose we need more pedophiles loose on the streets to reduce the rates of child molestation.

Yet every time we find out that government has lost billions, yes billions, of dollars that can’t be accounted for by the GAO, we either let the government get away this crime by ignoring the problems or we vote for some reformer who promises more government oversight. More money in government hands and more bureaucracy will never solve the problems of our corrupt or incompetent government.

The logical solution to the situation would actually call for a reduction in government programs that are failing or ending government agencies filled with corrupt, incompetent, or just uncaring workers. To do that people would have to admit that government doesn’t work. For some reason most Americans can’t or won’t allow their natural distrust of government to proceed to the next logical step, which is to vote for smaller less corrupt and less incompetent government. I know this means they would have to stop voting for any tax, any government program and any Republican or Democratic candidate.

Here’s the rub, nearly everyone knows that government doesn’t work and yet they still trust it to do the right thing, even after it has been proven incompetent and corrupt over and over again.

Sarcastically speaking, Social Security has been raided by politicians, but God knows we can’t trust the “private sector” with our retirement money. Why not, at least people in the private sector who steal peoples retirement funds through fraud and other unethical business practices generally go to jail for their crimes. How many heads of Social Security are in jail for robbing millions of taxpayers of their hard-earned retirement funds? How many Congressmen are rotting in jail for spending yours, your grandmother’s and your children’s retirement funds on pork barrel projects in their home states? Ideally, I would prefer that the government didn’t take any of our money for the “Ponzi Scheme” known as Social Security in the first place.

We know the president’s father, as head of the CIA, had the CIA training the afghan rebels whom later became part of the Al Qaida terrorist organization that we’re assured are responsible for the deaths of thousands on 9/11. We also know that for years America directly or indirectly armed and upheld the regimes of Iran and Iraq, creating our own worst enemies, and yet for some reason to bring up these points as a protest to the impending war makes the bearer of this horrible news unpatriotic.

Of course it is the very essence of patriotism for us to ignore the wrongs of our government’s perpetual foreign policy tragedies as we wave a flag and send someone else’s children and even sacrifice our own in the name of “liberty”, a word that our country traditionally has had a difficult time grasping the meaning of.

In the recent movie “The Patriot”, the French General helping the American colonists in their fight for freedom overhears the comments of a free white militiaman talking down to a enslaved black man conscripted by his master to fight in the war. The white man announces that he doesn’t trust the practice of giving arms to slaves. To which the French General replies “ Your sense of freedom is as pale as your skin.” Even today as, on average, 70+ percent of our diverse culture believes it is right for Americans to go to war against Iraq, I can’t help but feel our sense of freedom is as pale as the white of our flag.

How should we then proceed considering the circumstances that have led us to the precipice of war in full knowledge that our own government planted many of the seeds that have grown into this briar patch? War?

Overthrowing the monster that in many ways our government is responsible for creating may seem the only practical course of action. We must remember though, we know our own government has acted unethically and has even lied to its citizens to achieve our leader’s goals.

Most of the time we collectively forgive our leaders, sometimes forgiving the most corrupt offenses and then even going as far as to elevate them to grandiose stations in history.

FDR virtually turned our Republican form of government into a socialist form of government in a few short years. Also when his failed policies prolonged the worst depression in American history he saw his out, through a wars economic revival, by baiting the Japanese into attacking us while he claimed he would never drag us into a war in Europe. It has been proven that he even had early notice that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked and that he allowed it to happen so that the American people would willingly march into WWII. He even went as far as to allow the wholesale theft of property and businesses, ending in the internment camps that enslaved American citizens of Japanese descent. The best reply to that last event mentioned to me was that “You weren’t there. It was different then, you wouldn’t understand.” They were right, of course, I wouldn’t understand and I hope I never will.

So FDR was elevated to a virtual deity and is still portrayed in our schools that way. It is no wonder we allow these tragedies to befall the world and us. We can’t learn from our mistakes if we aren’t even taught them. Nor can we make the situation better through a government program of war, when we can’t even face the possibility that that our own government holds a major responsibility in the root causes of the war to begin with.

Until most Americans can say and vote in a fashion that reflects that “they love their country, but they don’t trust their government” then and only then will the words “it’s good enough for government work”, become a worn out colloquialism.