Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

 

Choose Your Crash Site

“Learn from the mistakes of others, because you will not live long enough to make them all yourself” is an old adage tossed around aviation circles. Heeding this advice, I read National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) aircraft incident reports where I have decided the truth is rarely discovered if the pilot survives the accident. We aviators tend to color our side of the story so as to tip the scales of second thoughts in our favor. Several years ago I read a report which makes me chuckle every time I think about it.

Intending to take two buddies for a sight-seeing flight, a novice pilot landed his Cessna 172 in a freshly harvested hay field. Depending on their waist and inseam measurements, the three souls on board may have pushed the anemic 145 horsepower Skyhawk over its gross weight limit. The pilot started his take-off roll and was rapidly using up his alfalfa runway when his left wing struck a round hay bale causing the plane to veer to the left. This is bad. Suddenly, his right wing struck a bale thereby re-aligning him with his imaginary runway. This is better, but still not good. With nearly all the field behind the plane and still lacking take-off airspeed, the aircraft plowed through a barbed wire fence, bounced across a gravel road and through another fence before an irrigation ditch sheared off the nose wheel. The pilot concluded this written testimony with the Mount Rushmore of understatements, “…then I lost control of the aircraft.” Apparently, through the pilots rose colored Bausch & Lomb’s, the take-off was going just as he planned until he lost his nose gear.

In retrospect, a view unavailable prior to takeoff, had there been one less backside in the cabin, a little more horsepower, or had the hay bales been moved off the airfield, the flight might have been a success. However, due to the pilot’s inexperience, poor judgment, or an obstinate refusal to recognize the obvious, a catastrophic event occurred; exactly as is happening today in Washington D.C. and this brings me to my point.

I launched my first campaign for public office and published my first Rambling of a Conservative Cow Doctor op-ed column on March 1st of 2006. Back then, our national debt was an outrageous and unsustainable 8 trillion dollars and for seven years I have repeatedly penned columns warning our great republic is about to shear off her nose gear. Blind to the obvious, Washington D.C. politicians keep loading fat backsides into the aircraft thinking the Federal Reserve can print enough money to repeal the law of gravity—just as Peter Pan does with Pixie dust. The passengers are so mesmerized chatting on their new Obama phones they cannot recognize the danger. Today, our national debt is nearly 17 trillion dollars, so America’s ill-fated airship of state has already bounced off two hay bales and is plowing through the first fence. Spending is the problem, I see it, perhaps you see it, but Washington does not.

In the face of this catastrophic debt, President Obama and Washington Democrats are hell bent on growing government with the implementation of Obamacare; loading even more weight into our over gross weight airplane. Apparently there has been a rash of successful spine transplants in Washington, because a majority of Republicans are holding fast to their pledge to stop Obamacare. For the moment, they have voted to fully fund government only if the not-so-Affordable Care Act is removed, delayed, or at least forced on members of Congress exactly as it is on the little people. Knowing the state run media, the propaganda wing of Marxism, always protects the political left; the Democrats have refused all negotiations, rejected all three offers and blamed the shut down all on the Republicans.

With America at her debt limit, our government has shut down. Well, not exactly shut down, it’s more of a slim down with essential services continuing to consume tax dollars. Both President Obama and all Washington Democrats either cannot see the perils of their spending flight plan, or they see it clearly and want American free-market capitalism to shear off her nose gear and crash so a new, socialist utopia can emerge from the ashes. Which is it? Whether ignorance or intentional, either choice should disqualify them as a pilot of our great American experiment in freedom. We can unload excess cargo now, or sort through what is left of America at the crash scene.



 
 
 
 
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