Oh, how I love presidential election years. They bring out the best in us all, don't they? The best of Newt Gingrich scares me, but I don't really want to criticize candidates. No, I want to criticize entire political parties, and anyone who has an iron-clad ideology, really. Which is every campaigning candidate. I think it's one of the pre-requisites of running: you have to be entirely certain (or at least appear entirely certain) that you are right and everyone else is dead wrong. And that is part of what bugs me about politics.
The center of my intense dislike of politics is hypocrisy, and here is how I see that play out in our two-party system. Both Republicans and Democrats (and Ron Paul, whatever he actually is) want to have their cake and eat it too, and that never, never works. For Republicans it comes off this way--Keep your dirty, liberal, lazy (and sometimes dark-skinned) fingers out of my wallet. But you don't mind if I tell you how, when, why and with whom you have sex, do you? Their strong stance on moral issues clashes with their laissez-faire attitude toward taxes and regulation of private enterprise and personal wealth. From where I'm sitting, how, when, why, and for whom you spend your money is as much a moral issue as abortion, gay marriage, or the legalization of marijuana (all of which, I'm afraid, are more important in appealing to certain groups of voters during a campaign than they are when it comes to actual governance). You cannot demand freedom in the economic sphere while simultaneously attempting to legislate the personal lives of the folks you don't like very much.
Democrats aren't much better. They just flip the script. Stay the hell out of my bedroom and the consequences of what I do there, but you don't mind if I reach in your wallet just for a minute or two...Aaaargh. It makes utterly no sense. If you are going to have an immovable position of freedom to do whatever you want in one area, don't you have to extend that liberty in all the other areas, too? Including regulation of business and taxation?
Or here's a novel idea. Compromise. Everybody could come off their high horse, even during an election year, and stop drawing lines in the sand. I'm not always right. Neither are you. Nor are the people who are on either side of any issue. We're all fallible humans, and that's not a bad thing. It only gets ugly when we pretend we're not, and spend years trying to convince voters that we're infallible, even when we're supposed to be governing.
I do realize that's an oversimplification of a far more complex system, but that's the kernel of my understanding of it. And I'd caution you not to assume from what I've written above that you know how I feel about anything from abortion to federal regulation of the private sector. Nor who I'm voting for. I'm happy to talk about those things, but not on a blog. I'm far too fallible, and aware of it, to broadcast those opinions on the Internet.
