Frustrating, When They Don’t Listen. Animals do not know what we do not tell them, and often do not listen when we tell them. Thus, I do not bother telling my dogs to eat neatly, or stop leaving hair everywhere, would do no good. When I tell them not to bark at a coyote, they just wag, no use. Life can be like that.
In October 2022, a Gallup poll showed half our nation ranked the economy “the most important problem.” Nevertheless, in 2022, the federal government overspent revenues by 28.7 percent, leaving a 1.45 trillion-dollar (one year) deficit, shoveled into a $30 trillion national debt.
In 2023, the government then spent 1.7 trillion dollars more than collected, a larger deficit, larger national debt, and inflation doubled in January 2021, after being up five-fold through July 2022. Interest rates were at 5.3 percent, a 22-year high. Inflation and interest hit all Americans hard, a year after that poll.
Despite agony at the pump, grocery store, paying rent, interest on cards, car loans, mortgages, and higher prices for everything from prescriptions to oil, politicians did nothing. Worse, they continued to spend money Americans do not have on things they do not want, no bark, no wag, no excuse, no care.
For more than two decades, a supermajority of Americans – more than 80 percent in recent years – has been concerned about illegal immigration. Gallup polls again show consistent concern.
Other polls show stronger sentiment, with one national poll documenting 63 percent disturbed by immigration policies, a 13 percent jump in the past three years. By January 2024, even liberal CBS revealed that 93 percent of Americans call illegal immigration at the border a crisis (45 percent), very serious (30 percent), or somewhat serious (17 percent).
Over the past three years, the government has been worse than non-responsive. They brazenly opened the border, releasing millions of illegals into our country who, before January 2021, were not here.
Replacing a fortified, policed border with an operationally open border, more than seven million illegal aliens have been released into the US interior, often secretly shipped to states in the dark of night – by our own federal government leaders, no one stepping up to stop the dishonor, disrespect for laws.
The scope, methods, and numbers – not to mention the level of drug trafficking, sex trafficking, terror list apprehensions (hundreds), and so-called “gotaways” is utterly unprecedented, nothing ever seen.
If this were not enough, the government is attacking states that protect themselves, recently Texas, in contravention of American legal precedent and history, helping unvetted drug, sex, and child traffickers, convicted felons, and other illegals enter the country, and then “placing” them in every single state.
Not surprisingly, drug, sex, and child trafficking is destroying young lives at an unheard-of-rate, with more than 300,000 young Americans dead during this Administration from fentanyl, thousands trafficked for sex, a horror the Administration has blithely compounded, effectively complicit, as if it did not matter.
Worse still, the Administration downplays overdose deaths, lets trafficking felons out, has done little to stop China and Mexico from shipping fentanyl – enough to kill every American multiple times – and then cynically derides the movie, Sound of Freedom, vividly explaining the horrors of child trafficking – while the Administration is unable to account for 85,000 illegal children.
The hypocrisy, deafness to public concern, and sense of indifference to serious issues, each profoundly important to individual Americans and their families, is breathtaking, earth-shaking, and heartbreaking.
Of my animals, I expect little. I expect them to sit, come, go, bark, eat, make a mess. Animals do that, do not listen, and do not comprehend. Thus, I do not bother telling them my views.
But American politicians, elected and appointed leaders, those who take and spend our money, ask for our trust, are sworn to protect our country – of them, I expect more, much more.
I do not expect abuse of power, rash overspending, personal greed, sense of entitlement, arrogance, open borders, complicity with drug traffickers and those selling children into sex slavery, ruining their lives, unrepentant infliction of damage to our nation’s social fabric, public safety, and respect for laws.
Bluntly, I expect more of every politician than I do my dogs, yet there are days when things being equal, my dogs listen better, and add more to life than those I voted for. Life can be like that. Frustrating, when they don’t listen.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
