Blame Game

I was in Wal-Mart the other day, stocking up on travel supplies, when I encountered a young man on the aisle where shaving and hair products were located. While I checked prices on various shampoos and paid him little mind, his wife or significant other arrived with a cart.


“Look at this,” he said, and held out some kind of razor kit to her. The anger in his voice was obvious, and I thought for a minute that he was upset with her for some reason. He shook the package in her face, “Thirteen dollars!”

She nodded her head in agreement, something I believe she has to do a lot and said, “That’s pretty high.”

“I used to could get these for six or seven dollars,” he said, in disgust. Then he added, “Thank you, Mr. Obama!”

I almost laughed. If not for the fact that he looked and acted like the kind of guy who liked to kick puppies for fun, I would have. It was almost like watching a Saturday Night Live skit about stupid people, but then I realized that this really shouldn’t have been funny. When I had time to think about it, what he said was both a little bit scary and pathetically sad because this man actually walks among us, breathing our air and taking up space in the checkout line. He and his anger are on the road when I and my family are. He also has the ability to procreate.

Now, don’t get me wrong, if you want to get upset with the current President over the jobless rate, Health Care Reform, taxes or his stance on foreign affairs, then by all means, you have a right to your opinion. I might not agree with you on all your points, but that’s okay. Let’s have a reasonable, respectful discussion and then go get some coffee.

But when someone blames the President for the price of a razor, I think he has some serious issues. First and foremost, he’s an idiot. He might not be able to do anything about that, because he was probably born that way. Unfortunately, there is no cure, and no amount of logic can persuade him otherwise. He is probably a miserably unhappy person who goes through life looking for someone to blame. In the case of the razor, he would have been wiser to be upset with Mr. Gillette, but I got the impression that everything wrong in this man’s life was now being blamed on Barack Hussein Obama (accent on the “Hussein”).

Second, and more bothersome, he’s likely not alone in this train of thought. There are a lot of unhappy people in this world who don’t want to accept responsibility for any of their failings and look for a big target to pin all their troubles on. We end up seeing some of these people in news stories, being described by the neighbors as “quiet” and “kept to themselves.”

This kind of “blame game” goes on with every president. There were idiots on the left who blamed every single problem in the world on George W. Bush. They were just as wrong as this Wal-Mart half-wit. I didn’t agree with a lot of what Bush did, but he had neither the power nor capability to either improve or destroy every component of my life. Same goes for Barack Obama.

Do I think that $13 is high for a package of razors? You bet (that’s another reason why I started growing a beard). But anyone with any common sense knows that pretty much all the “stuff” we buy has been going up in price for a long, long time. I hate to say it, but that’s what “capitalism” is all about: making more money. It doesn’t mean that we ALL make more money, but someone does. While we don’t have to be happy about it, we at least have to be realistic.

Unless we’re an idiot.