endless excuses

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Here you have a bunch of fairly highly respected people talking about the Obama Administration so far. Beside the egregious misunderstandings of facts exhibited here, you have this theme developing that Obama can only do so much before the political reality in DC rubs it out. They do manage to get in some extremely salient points about the travesty in progress, and so it's worth listening to for that reason alone, but I'd like to know how you think generating endless excuses for bad behavior and negligence and laziness and outright incompetence can ever constitute addressing the lethal problems that ruin so many lives.

This is how humans deal with discomfort, with uncomfortable reality. They generate excuses, make them up out of thin air, or even point to stuff that is real but doesn't actually viably excuse anything, doesn't alter the truth, doesn't arc toward effectively solving a problem, toward raising prospects for everyone concerned. Useless. Except... the excuses obfuscate that, make thin air look like problem-solving, and get CALLED "problem solving". Hardly anybody pipes up to complain that nothing has been solved. That's rude.

Really easy example: Someone says, "I am not a liar," and someone else reminds him about how he told his boss he was sick when he really just wanted to take his kids to the beach, and someone else pops up to assert that if he'd told the truth he might have been fired. That, in the minds of all three, preserves the notion, amazingly to me, that the guy's not a liar. Best case scenario is that one or two or all three amend the original statement to "I am not a liar, except when I might get fired if I don't lie." The problem of a liar posing as a truth teller isn't solved, even in the best case scenario. When you bring this mundane and fairly innocuous little example up to the level of world leaders, you have the verge of apocalypse playing out completely unattended by positive intention.

Is that really too recondite to recognize?

Is the wish not to offend people in the audience really worth completely obliterating the application of perfectly serviceable intellect to life and death situations?

Really?