Consequence Free

Wouldn’t it be great if no one ever got offended?
Wouldn’t it be great to say what’s really on your mind?
I have always said all the rules are made for bending;
And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?

Chorus:
I wanna be consequence-free;
I wanna be where nothing needs to matter.
I wanna be consequence-free,
Just sing Na Na Na Na Na Na Ya Na Na.

I could really use to lose my Catholic conscience,
‘Cause I’m getting sick of feeling guilty all the time.
I won’t abuse it, yeah, I’ve got the best intentions
For a little bit of anarchy, but not the hurting kind.

Chorus

I couldn’t sleep at all last night
‘Cause I had so much on my mind.
I’d like to leave it all behind,
But you know it’s not that easy

Chorus

Wouldn’t it be great if the band just never ended?
We could stay out late and we would never hear last call.
We wouldn’t need to worry about approval or permission;
We could slip off the edge and never worry about the fall.

Chorus out

It’s a catchy song, and the video (which is below, if you’re interested) is the sort of fun, goofy piece that Great Big Sea likes to do.  It’s also, as I’ve said somewhere, one of the stupidest song lyrics I’ve ever run across.  What does it mean when our actions are consequence-free?  When our actions have no consequences, we say they’re inconsequential; that means they don’t matter, which is why inconsequential is a synonym for unimportant or insignificant.  If nothing we ever did had consequences, if none of it ever mattered, then we wouldn’t matter; if all our actions were insignificant, it would mean that we would be insignificant, our lives would be meaningless.  As I wrote last fall,

The key is that our actions matter because we matter. Indeed, we matter enough to God that he was willing to pay an infinite price for our salvation; and so our actions matter greatly to him, both for their effect on others (who matter to him as much as we do) and for their effect on us. Our actions have eternal consequence because we are beings of eternal consequence; it could not be otherwise.

Only a fool could wish for insignificance; it’s profoundly foolish even to feign a wish for such a thing.

Now, it’s hardly a new or shocking idea to suggest that our media establishment is composed largely of fools, but they’re so far in the tank for Barack Obama that it’s taking them to new and surprising depths of folly.  We see this particularly in the ongoing effort by the MSM—who would be better called the OSM, the Obama-stream media; they’re so deep in his pocket, they’re nothing more than pocket lint at this point—to render the president consequence-free, at least when it comes to negative consequences:  if anything bad happens, it’s all that evil Bush’s fault, or that evil Cheney’s fault, or the fault of some other evil Republican.  The deepest depths of this drivel (so far) have been plumbed by Maureen Dowd, who wrote in the New York Times,

No matter if or when terrorists attack here, and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan, red/blue state timetable, Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

In other words, it doesn’t matter when it happens, or what happens, or how it happens, or what could have happened, or what the president and his administration have done, or what they haven’t done, or what they could have done, or what they should have done—according to Maureen Dowd, if terrorists ever do anything here again, no matter what, it’s Dick Cheney’s fault.

Now, to a superficial mind, I can see the appeal of this:  it preserves the “blame everything on the GOP” strategy that got the Democratic Party to power, wherein it is asserted that only the GOP can do or cause bad things, while all good things are solely to the credit of the donkeys.  What Dowd apparently fails to see, however, is the way in which her assertion completely emasculates President Obama and his administration.  What she’s essentially saying is that Barack Obama is fundamentally inconsequential and ineffectual, at least by comparison to the previous administration.  George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the ones with the real power, the ones who really matter; Barack Obama just can’t be expected to compare, or to have the same kind of effect on the world.  He can’t be held responsible if al’Qaeda or somebody else attacks us, because, um, it can’t possibly be his fault, because, uh, well, he just can’t be; there has to be someone else to blame.  The buck doesn’t stop at his desk; that’s above his pay grade, or something.

I’m sorry, but when people start saying things like that about the President of the United States, that’s just pathetic.  But hey, at least he can dance around and look cool, like these guys: