The cherub-faced beardless-youth Jesse Taylor lays his finger on exactly what is wrong with politics, not just today, but most of the time.
But think about this - how many debates do we have in this country that start off under patently false pretenses? Tort reform, the estate tax, Social Security, the war in Iraq, and many more. It's not even different interpretations of the facts, different glosses on the same basic ideas. The partisan divide comes from the fact that we're having totally different debates on the same issues, to the point where we simply are talking about disparate ideas and problems.
How can a policy apparatus produce good results when it's geared towards solving problems that don't exist?
Our political debates are not between sincere people who disagree on the solutions to agreed upon problems or even sincere people who disagree on the definition of the problems. Our debates are too often between people who want to define the problem is such a way that their desired program is the only possible solution.
I am not resentful that Jesse figured this out a decade or so younger than I did; I’m annoyed that I figured it out a decade or so older than Jesse did. Damn kid.
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