Analogy Fail

Recently, when Barack Obama was pushing the challenging but - he thinks - do-able task of re-arranging massive aspects of the entire health care industry in America, he invoked the Apollo 11 space mission to use as a comparative rallying point.

Uhhhh... try again.

To think that the Apollo 11 mission and ObamaCare are comparable in the least, is a joke. Analogy = FAIL.

The reasons are simple.

Yes, it took Uncle Sam's wallet to fund NASA and the people in charge of putting us on the moon. Yes, it took JFK's stated mission to land on the moon as a generational challenge to official put us on the clock. Yes, it also took Russians working hard in their own backyard on the thing to prompt us along.

But after all that, it took a room full of extremely smart - likely, brilliant - scientists and mathemeticians to get Messers Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins up and back without a scratch.

The people who populate Congress are not that smart.

Not by a moon shot.

On a good day, our politicians are stupid, lazy, corrupt, and horny. Don't ask about all their other days. The men in charge of the Apollo 11 mission wake up smarter than 99% of us will ever be on our best day.

Plus, the moon landing was relatively simple compared to overhauling the most complex part of our trillion dollar economy. Moon landings are math. Health care is complicated choices, the vagaries of personal habits and genetics, and limited resources.

Lastly, whether or not Neil Armstrong came back to earth as a national hero, or a crispy burnt chicken nugget in a tin can, didn't matter personally to every working person in America. Sure, we'd have been sad. Very sad. But we'd press on. Like after the Challenger disaster.

The cost of botching Apollo 11 was relatively low. Would we be embarrassed as a nation? Maybe. Would we lose some good, good men? Maybe. But in all likelyhood, we'd have a line of even braver men volunteering for the next mission to the moon, because that's how we roll.

And we'd have figured it out.

Good luck on fixing our complex health care system if the Democrats succeed in breaking it totally. Is it perfect now? Hell no. Nobody said that. But government's ability to complete fuck something up, is beyond debate.

Rasmussen Reports said back in February that "voters strongly agree with the perspective that “No matter how bad things are, Congress can always find a way to make them worse.” Fifty-eight percent (58%) share that view, and only 26% disagree."

This was before the $787 StimuFail package, and the now hilarious dog-chasing-his-tail economic policy of "Cash for Clunkers."

So stop the moon landing thing. As an analogy, it blows up on the launch pad. Government didn't put us on the moon, scientists did. And we paid for it anyway.