-Is anyone else bored with the state of affairs? Democrats and Republicans, Blue Dogs, Tea Partyists. All flavors of the same tired partisan gridlock. While there are no less than 50 current "parties" in the United States, many of them are local parties focused on state or local issues. -Have you ever heard of the Alaskan Independence Party (clearly from Alaska), the Aloha Aina Party Hawaii), the Blue Enigma Party (Delaware), The Rent is Too Damn High Party (New York), the Marijuana Reform Party (no, not California for all of you who jumped to that conclusion, but rather New York), the United Citizens Party (South Carolina) and the Liberty Union Party (Vermont).
-I have no idea what any of the above mentioned parties stand for (well that is not 100% true: I can guess at what the "rent" and "marijuana" parties are fighting for, but have no idea what the Aloha Aina Party does, except maybe to lobby for Luau's). What I can tell you is that both the Republican and Democratic parties have become nothing more than a conglomeration of special interest representation. They do not represent "the people" or even the people in their respective parties or constituencies. They represent themselves. The machines of replenishment which refill their individual party coffers and ensure that their members get re-elected, which, in turn, further defends the status quo.
-From time to time a movement will erupt within a party which threatens to change the course of that party. Today, the Republicans have the Tea Party group. They represent a movement for generally smaller government and lower taxation, largely in response to the taxpayer bailout of the 2008 near crash.
-Goes to show what those idiots know. Supporting smaller government and lower taxation are most certainly along the guidelines intended as principles of the first American government as established by our founding fathers (taxation being, as most of you know, a catalyst issue for the initiation of our struggle for independence - actually the battle for the elimination of taxation without representation). However, for a party to be so ignorant of the near catastrophe with which the United States, and the world, was confronted and to assume that the bailout was a mistake, is naive. When your espoused leaders are Dick Armey, a long time Texas tripe, and Sarah Palin, a flash in the pan, wish she would go back to Alaska and do what she does best (raising her kids, oops, and snow shoeing) ; one should wonder what the party participant's decision making process really is.
-As a matter of fact, 80% of Tea Partiers polled (as usual, no one called me to get my opinion, funnily enough) view themselves as Republican. Shocker. Big government, huge entitlement Democrats don't fit the bill?
-Not to only pick on the Republicans, the Democrats have their fan base: Progressives (a stem of the old New Left movement), Libertarians , Blue Dogs and others. Both parties are in effect, a coalition of a broad group of constituent followers bound under a larger banner or label (if this was Europe, and thank God it is not, we would have some 1500 parties trying to weave a perpetually impossible coalition government, and gridlock, as bad as it is now, would wind up looking like the 405 on a Friday afternoon.
-In the previous days of our nation's history, there were some parties of promise, not locked into complete intransigence as the elephant and the donkey now are. Whigs and Federalists, Progressives, and my all-time favorite, the Bull Moose Party, all washed through the system addressing different period issues, and ultimately getting absorbed into the 2 behemoths which became Democrats and Republicans. In the course of doing so , they lost the bulk of their purpose or cause (in some cases becoming superfluous to what they were originally founded for - the Bull Moose, for example, was Teddy Roosevelt's attempt to return from safari in Africa and rest the Presidency back from his protégé, Taft).
-Nowadays, using a Pew Research Center, only 36% identify themselves as Democrats and 27% as Republicans, leaving 37% who identify themselves as affiliates of other parties or independents. Those independents have been the subject of great focus in the last few elections, swinging left or right like leaves in a prevailing breeze. The question is: are they best served by jumping into bed, in one election or another, with the decrepit and tired parties.
-Shouldn't the independent vote in this country amount to more? Is there some leadership still out in the wilderness willing to embrace change, real change. Not Obama, dyed-in-the-wool waiver to get re-elected change, but the kind of change which will address the issues we need tackled head on with no regard to tabloid journalism, the lack of intelligence of the masses or re-election? I can only hope.
-If not, bring back the Bull Moose Party with a motto of "Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick".
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