No surprise, but I'm glad others are feeling as disgusted and disaffected with both parties as I am. I don't agree with Leonard Pitts on every point he makes in every column, but almost every one of those columns is worth reading. The following passage rings truer than almost anything I've read (at least with respect to politics) in days:
One also wonders if Democrats who exult over the Post-ABC poll might not want to read it more closely. Yes, it finds Republicans down to a historic low of 20 percent. But it also says only 33 percent of Americans call themselves Democrats, a decline of seven percentage points just since March 2008.
So this poll does not suggest an electorate crying, "Yay, Democrats!" so much as one crying, with apologies to Shakespeare, "A plague on both their houses!" Consider: a Rasmussen Reports poll last month found 60 percent of Americans saying "neither" party has the answers to what ails this nation.
Seldom has the need for a viable third party been more apparent.
Unfortunately, we don't have that and won't in the near future. We are left instead with two parties that might better be named Angry and Dopey. One manufactures votes by scaring voters to the polls ("Vote for us or Muslim terrorists will sneak over the border from Mexico and gay-marry your children!"). The other chases legislative power as frantically as Wile E. Coyote chased Roadrunner, but handles it with the same cool authority Barney Fife once handled his gun.
Where do we go from here, now all of the grown-ups are children? And why do they waste our lives, but not one of them lend us a hand?
Continuing, without poetic license,
I don't wanna live here no more, I don't wanna stay Ain't gonna spend the rest of my life, quietly fading away...
Games people play, you take it or you leave it Things that they say, honor brite If I promise you the moon and the stars, would you believe it? Games people play in the middle of the night
Where do we go from here now that all of the children have grown up? And how do we spend our lives knowin' nobody gives us a damn?
I don't think this song was meant to be about (national) politics, but it fits all too well.
Not snarky at all, but well said. I've been feeling similarly about the two-party system. Was just ranting to my wife the other day that the combination of our adversarial legal system and a government thoroughly riddled with lawyers, is creating an increasingly stronger polarization in our governors every day. There's little effort to share power and govern responsibly and lots o'effort to push each other further apart.
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Not snarky at all, but well said. I've been feeling similarly about the two-party system. Was just ranting to my wife the other day that the combination of our adversarial legal system and a government thoroughly riddled with lawyers, is creating an increasingly stronger polarization in our governors every day. There's little effort to share power and govern responsibly and lots o'effort to push each other further apart.
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