We the People - but not united
By Allen
J Duffis
Published: January 4, 2008
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The American Political Circus:A Study in Confusion Republicans like to run by saying that government doesn't work. Then they get elected, and they prove it. It’s gotten to the point where the Democratic Party is both the liberal party AND the conservative party in this country. There’s nothing conservative about record deficits. There’s nothing conservative about billions of dollars in earmarks. There’s nothing conservative about using taxpayer funds to reward your campaign donors. There’s nothing conservative about refusing to pay attention to waste, fraud, and contract abuse in Iraq. And there’s certainly nothing conservative about running out of money so that we can’t invest in things like early childhood education and health care to build a stronger workforce and a stronger America. Quote: Anonymous Leader of the Most Powerful Nation on Earth 
On the morning of September 11, 2001, President George Walker Bush was in Florida meeting with a group of public school children. He continued his "meeting" which included distractedly paging through a nursery rhyme book for almost 12 minutes, even after being informed that the worst attack on U.S. soil in the History of America - was well under way. Our elected president then went on to brazenly squander a tidal wave of sympathy and support from virtually the entire world, by the unnecessary invasion a sovereign nation; one that did not attack us and was in no manner involved in the 9-11 incident. And to further cloudy the waters of his personal integrity, he carried out this military incursion under the cover of evidence that it has since be proved - he had to have known was false. To date his, his still unexplained and irresponsible actions in this matter (there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq) has cost us dearly - in international prestige and American blood. 
So far, at a cost exceeding $500 billion, we have also lost the lives of almost 4000 American servicemen and women, an estimated 30,000 plus injured physically and mentally beyond reasonable recovery, and an uncountable number of Iraqi citizen deaths. And it should also be mentioned that his is the first president in wartime to not have attended one single military funeral. This man conveyed this country from the state of relative inherited financial prosperity when he took office in 2000 ($750 billion surplus - a legitimate number confirmed by Alan Greenspan and the GAO), to a state of technical bankruptcy. In fact, he employed the surplus to give a tax cut to the wealthiest 1.5 percent of the country. Our national debt now exceeds $9 trillion and, according to the Wall Street Journal, is growing at the unprecedented rate of $1.1 million dollars a minute. Nor should it be forgotten that, so far, he has managed to sidestep the fate of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, who was impeached for lying to congress while under oath. To avoid running into that hurdle, now or in the future, by claiming presidential privilege he has simply refused to give 'any' testimony to congress - under oath. Also, it was his cabinet cohorts who conspired to reveal the name of a covert CIA operative to discredit her husband, a former U.S. ambassador, who dared to challenge his administration's assertion that the Iraqis tried to acquire Uranium yellow cake from Niger to refine for nuclear weapons. That claim was based upon forged documents that had 'already' been revealed to be fake. To gain a clue as to why we ever elected such a person to our nation's highest office, one simply has to list the average responses given by a large portion of our citizenry to the above listed accusations: His almost response to an act of war taking place throughout the country. Bush Supporter response: "He wasn't properly informed." His given reasons for invading Iraq: Bush Supporter Response: "There were weapons of destruction there when his father invaded in the first gulf war, and Saddam Hussein might have restarted the WMD program." The war cost in American lives and dollars.: Bush Supporter response: "We lost more than ten times that amount of troops in Vietnam, and probably in today's inflation adjusted costs the same amount of money." The callous spending in the first 9-10 months of the inherited surplus; Bush Supporter Response: "That money wasn't real. It was a result of the 'dot-com' bubble. There never was any real surplus from the Clinton administration." His never attending a military funeral. Bush Supporter response: "He knows that his attendance would only give fuel to those who are against him, and they would use it in a campaign to make us quit and, in the process, lose the war in Iraq." His refusal to testify to congress, under oath like President Clinton was compelled to, but in Bush's case about the 9-11 attack and the Iraq War. Bush Supporter response: "As president, to do so he would have to reveal secret data that could jeopardize the war effort, and also compromise the intelligence community. As to the outing of a covert CIA operative: Bush Supporter response: "Everybody knew who she was no matter what she, or the agency, or her turncoat husband says." So where are the claimed Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction? Bush Supporter response: "Because the United Nations stalled the start of the war effort, it gave the Iraqis time to spirit them away to Syria." When taking account of this politically deranged thinking process, that - as an expression of patriotism - tends toward the blunt disregard of reality in any form that defies that professed by the Bush administration, it is important to note how they feel on other matters. These are the same people who feel it was thoroughly appropriate, at an estimated cost of $53 million dollars, to impeach a president for engaging in a consensual extramarital sex affair in office - that caused the death of not a single person. While in the same breath they angrily condemn any move toward impeachment of a president who starts an unnecessary war that has taken thousands of American and foreign lives - and in the process cost the American taxpayer more than half a trillion dollars to date.. From this average daily exchange that can be heard, in many variations, on the streets, and in restaurants and coffee shops throughout America,, it should be clear to all why George W. Bush was elected to the presidency - twice. We as a nation went into absolute shock upon the surprise infliction of 9-11 upon us, and as a 'people' we have as yet to recover. Many of us wanted a stern faced, square jawed gun toting' hero to exact revenge for us (like a John Wayne or a Ronald Reagan) and, unfortunately, George W. Bush was there at that critical moment. Who Are "We" the American People? As Americans, we have a decided tendency to paint a heroic picture of who we are, both as a nation and a people. Until the beginning of the last century that custom crafted historical view remained, largely intact, unruffled and unchallenged. In present times, however, that painting is not only showing wear, but is rapidly crumbling from exposure to global and sometimes domestic criticism. As it may be, we are beginning to show wear around the edges and through the fabric of our own construction. In essence, political reality has broken through and revealed us to be not who we thought we were. If the truth be our guide, in the guise of a well structured Constitutional Democratic Republic, Americans of this generation have shown themselves to be a rather hateful people. Nowhere is the evidence for this view more openly pronounced then in the manner by which we choose our leaders. At present, the our elective process is more akin to a killing field than an orderly selection of representatives by majority rule. We have become a politically and culturally 'segregated' society; one which requires our best qualified people to run a gauntlet of false accusation, cosmetic appeal and fealty to religious dogma to achieve governmental office. And in the end, more often than not, we gain the prize of electing not the best leaders, but instead the 'best liars' or morally flawed guardians of our moral integrity as a nation. This major flaw in our elective process now exists because "We the People" prefer to cast our votes, not for who we want, but as a weapon to stop or impede the success of those we don't like. We have come to adopt the old adage of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" as a guide to how we vote. So we choose to vote against the one we hate, for whatever reasons, rather than for our preferential choice. We look to elect 'winners' over those dictated by our conscience. This intellectually skewed process, fueled by hatred (for reasons of religion, non-religion, taxation, social reform, race and gender), has degraded our elective process. We have eliminated the thinking process from the elective process, and with it the prospect of sane choice from our political practice. Yes, that is who and what "We the People" have become. Our Flawed Judgment as a People 
When Margaret Thatcher ran for prime minister of Great Britain, there were little if any comments about her physical attributes as a woman or a human being. And the few comments or political cartoons there were reflected a purely humorous outlook on her candidacy, not her 'looks' or the parts of her body. In fact, the only general comment made about her that was heralded everywhere, was in reference to the nickname she'd earned over many terms in parliament from peers and public alike, namely that of 'the Iron Lady.' 
We now have our own well qualified female running for the office of president, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has the experience of having been a United States First Lady for eight tears, the first American first lady to ever run for public office, and a Senator from New York State for seven years. Yet she continues to be vilified in the press, magazines and on the Internet as though she were an alien creature from another planet. By innuendo she has been accused of being crooked, immoral, a liar, a possible closet lesbian and, almost to her face, of being physically ugly to look at. As one bumper sticker I have encountered stated: "Hillary, ugly to wake up to as a wife or president!" Most of this abject hatred is coming from one segment of the political landscape in particular, that being the forces and their supporters on the Right. However, when Elizabeth Dole made a brief run for the presidency, as intensively as I have researched, I can find nor do I remember any offensive reference to her female particulars, cosmetic or otherwise. One has to ask - why was that? Therefore, one can only conclude that to a major part of the American electorate, both Right and Left, it has become impossible to support their political choices, without denigrating the opposition on a level and with an intensity equivalent to absolute hatred. This does not bode well for us as a people or as a democratically governed nation. Best Candidate for United States Presidency In the opinion of this editor, at present, there are 3 Democrats and 1 Republican who register by record and word as qualified for this very important post of president. However, we find there is only one. A Democrat, we would consider as well suited for the post of vice president: John Edwards. Thankfully, all are human and do bear personal and policy flaws, but none so far revealed to be critical. They are as follows: DEMOCRATIC PARTY
REPUBLICAN PARTY
The chance we have as a country is that one of these 4 candidates for the office of President of the United States will make it. however, the ever present looming nightmare is that one of the others running will do so instead. Destruction of the Middle Class: In Progress Whoever becomes the new leader of the 'free world' must be prepared to face awesome challenges. For he or she will have to take on not only the threats from outside our country, but also ones posed by the political intransigence of many of our citizens. And the first such task will be to at least slow the dissolution of the country's Middle Class. 
Several recent studies as to the real-time plight of America's rapidly dwindling Middle Class, such as the following by Yale University and the Wall Street Journal, revealed virtually the same results. The studies exposed the true relationship between America's wealthy and its Middle Class: It showed that America’s most wealthy earn an even greater share of the nation’s income than they did in 2000, at the peak of the tech boom. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported, earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005 (the latest date for which these data are available), up from the high of 20.8 percent they'd reached in the bull market of 2000. The bottom 50 percent of people earned 12.8 percent of all income, compared with 13 percent in 2000. And the median tax filer’s income fell 2 percent when adjusted for inflation (to about $31,000) between 2000 and 2005. More and more people are being priced out of a middle class existence. Because of housing prices, because of health care costs, because of tax policy, because of the cost of childcare, The Good Life – a life of relative comfort and financial security – is now, in many parts of the country, an upper-middle-class luxury. What this appears to mean is that our society is presently in the process of building a new class of citizenry. In essence, one more in tune to the workforce desires and demands of the corporate world: namely - 'a technically adept' peasantry. America's Future: Left, Right or Middle? Clearly, the direction for American to take politically is - middle of the road. That is the only pathway to the future that is paved with the critical factor necessary to safely enter the future - compromise. Americans have to be prepared to face a future that will compel them to make and accept intelligent compromise solutions to its problems - domestic and foreign, regardless from which political quarter it may emanate. For such a path traveled is the only way to address the myriad problems about to confront us as a people and a nation. The only other option left open is chaos - like Rome near the end.
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