WASHINGTON D.C.—Just thinking about the ads political candidates are running against their competitors makes most people’s skin crawl. With the exception of a small handful of political hopefuls, we never hear from a candidate on what they will do to make things better, we hear only what voting for the other person will mean for the nation. It’s always dire, nothing positive.
The Democratic Party uses their boogey-man ads, “The Republicans want to privatize social security.” The Republican Party runs, “Obama is not one of us, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are too liberal.” The scary thing is how many people fall for the same rhetoric and lack any knowledge year after year while being lied to by the party they are affiliated with. We have 24-hour news channels with talking heads who are more interested in being perceived as knowledgeable saviors to their true-believer audience members and selling books than actually doing their job, which is actually telling the news and letting people make up their own minds. However, now everyone is an opinion maker, when in the old days opinion makers like George Will and Cal Thomas actually had an educated background in government and economics. The current talking heads simply pander to one extreme side or the other of two political parties, which both are incapable of running the nation any longer.
The media has played an extremely detrimental role in making Americans illiterate, stupid and unable to figure out how to get to the truth for themselves. Americans and especially Tea Partiers scream about how awful the government is, and although they are correct, they never turn the mirror on themselves and see that their behavior is at the very least equally appalling and unhelpful, and in some ways even worse than the status quo. Bigotry has played a major role in this anti-government sentiment, which is sad because the mess we are in didn’t just start in the last two years or the last eight. It all started decades earlier when in the ’80s our federal deficit for the first time hit three trillion dollars and no one complained at the time.
We also have politicians, once disgraced by multiple divorces, sleeping with interns and getting involved with political scandals, who are now parading around the nation preaching to the public and talking as if they are celebrities and not statesmen. You would think that once someone has been a president, speaker of the house, a congressman or a senator, that they would behave in a dignified manner and not pander to bigotry and fear mongering. However, the scariest thing about these people is that they are all positioning themselves to run for office again by pandering to the true believers who ignore the lunacy and non statesman-like behavior and call these political celebrities heroes for their causes. Both sides, liberals and conservatives have changed our nation and not for the good.
Former President Ronald Reagan, former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, former President George Herbert Walker Bush, former Senator George Mitchell and others like them were the epitome of statesmen. They may have made their arguments strongly, but they did not pander to the lowest common denominator amongst us.
Please remember our troops who fight in Afghanistan and Iraq against the terrorists. May they come home soon and with victory on their side.
