The Danger of the GOP's Refusal to Reject Ignorance and Obama's Refusal to Lead

Increasingly the USA - which once lead much of the world industrially and at times politically - seems to reject any concept of planning ahead. In business, all the focus is on the numbers for the next quarterly report and in politics, no one looks beyond talking points and slogans for the next election - if even that. Often it's the next news day cycle that represents long term planning. The myopia seems to be intensifying even as the USA has growing challenges from China, India and other rising nations that DO look at things with a longer view. Adding to the threat to stability and economic prosperity is the fact that one of the two major political parties seems to increasingly embrace ignorance and be focused solely on looking back in time trying to reprise a social model that never even truly existed. Compounding the problem is a president who refuses to be a leader on anything. He merely punts to Congress which does nothing. Thomas Friedman has a column in the New York Post that looks at this frightening reality. Here are some highlights:
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At a time when Japan is suffering a nuclear catastrophe that is likely to make the world even more dependent on oil and gas, at a time when the world’s top oil and gas producers are entering what will be, at best, an unstable, and, at worst, a viciously violent transition from autocracy to, one hopes, democracy, and at a time when the combination of the two could slow down global growth while we’re still trying to climb out of recession, America has no energy policy, no climate policy and no long-term plan to deal with its unsustainable deficit.
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[O]ur two political parties would rather focus on winning the next election and blaming the other guy than making hard choices.”
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President Obama has the right convictions on all these issues, but he has not shown the courage of his convictions. The Republicans have just gone nuts. If you listen to Obama, he eloquently describes our energy, climate and fiscal predicaments: how we have to end our addiction to oil and cut spending and raise revenues in an intelligent way that also invests in the future and doesn’t just slash and burn. But then the president won’t lead.
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[T]he president has never gotten in the G.O.P.’s face on this issue [energy policy]. He has not put his own energy plan on the table and then gone out to the country and tried to sell it. It is what a lot of Obama supporters find frustrating about him: They voted for Obama to change the polls not read the polls.
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Republicans, by contrast, are insisting that we can somehow drill our way out of our energy problems, and House Republicans just reported out of committee a bill that would block the E.P.A. from taking any action to reduce greenhouse gases, while also slashing government funds to keep air and water clean. So far, the G.O.P. is calling for cuts in the things we need to invest more in — like education and infrastructure — while leaving largely untouched things we need to reduce, like entitlements and defense spending. A country that invests more in its elderly than its youth, more in nursing homes than schools, will neither invent the future nor own it.
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The picture is bleak indeed. Many of us hoped for a transformational president in voting for Obama. We did not get what we wanted. Instead we have a spineless, equivocating follower. As for the GOP, having sold its soul first to the Christian Right and then the Tea Party, I see little hope for an intelligent, rational leader emerging. So what will happen? We will likely follow the path Britain did prior to WWII - being perceived as strong militarily even as the changes needed to sustain that power were ignored and/or turned back.