I’m tired. Fed up. Sick of all of it.

Since the beginning of the second Bush term till now, I believe that I have seen the worst performance of the political class of my lifetime. Democrats or Republicans, it doesn’t matter. It is the system. The culture destroys good people. A culture of “rules for thee, but not for me” have led to family values platforms that end with extra-marital affairs, promises made only to be thrown away in post-election reality, a monster central government that insists on substituting a “one size fits all” solution for individual choice and freedom, idiotic intrusions into our private lives and demonization of individual success and productivity and a President and Congress hell bent on ignoring their constituents and imposing their partisan politics on we, the ignorant – the health care/insurance debacle is just the most visible example…

The most amazing sight of the past 6 months for me has been the out and out illogic and hypocrisy that exists in public debate and the rank biased coverage of the activities by the media. I liken it to our politicians calling daytime night and saying that because they a have a majority of votes, it is true…and when we say “you, idiots, it is daytime”, we are vilified as the great unwashed.

Take the real estate bubble/Wall Street Implosion – Congress, through the various committees, set up the rules and provided incentives for the behavior that existed. The programs encouraged people who never should have qualified for loans to apply and required institutions to make bad loans. Business being business and stockholders being stockholders, both motivated by return on investment, did what businesses always do, they found ways to create and provide products to a highly regulated market. Those products were build on a shaky foundation of bad loans that were required to be made and like anything built on a weak foundation, eventually collapsed in a heap. Then the finger pointing began…but never once have I heard Chris “Friends of Angelo” Dodd or Barney “My Boy Lollipop” Frank accept one ounce of responsibility for anything. It is all Bush’s fault.

I still identify myself as a Republican although I’m not really sure what that means anymore. I think that it means that I’m not a Democrat. I find it interesting that the Republicans are today taking positions of the John Kennedy Democrats in the 60’s and the Democrats have completely gone off the left side of the table into true socialism. I challenge any honest, free thinking person to look at the platform of the Democrat Party and pick up writings by Karl Marx and not see direct ties. Look at our “progressive” tax policy – the top 1% now pay more in income taxes than the sum total of the bottom 95%. Something like 46% of our citizens pay no income tax whatsoever (www.irs.gov – I didn’t make this up). How can this not be defined as “From those according to their means, to those according to their needs”?

Ladies and gentlemen, from whatever political persuasion, we have to come together as a nation under a banner of honesty, integrity and truth. If you believe socialism is the right path, fine, let’s drag it out and debate it but let’s not disguise it as “universal health care”, “financial regulation for protecting the people”, “human caused disaster event” or some other sort of Orwellian doublespeak. Let’s not conduct the debate in 132 character Twitter posts or 30 second sound bites. That is the biggest problem that I have with our public discussion - no one wants to call a spade a spade and stand behind it or take a debate to its logical conclusion. I scream at the TV every night because of the misrepresentations and outright lies presented by both sides every day (I guess I’m a Republican because I think that they lie less than Democrats – what a false choice…).  Black, white or brown, a liar is a liar. A thug is still a thug, it doesn’t matter if they are a product of the inner city or a Skinhead compound. The truth is the truth; in real life there are no relativistic versions of the truth. Life is just that way, you either put gas in the car or you run out. You either succeed or fail. I either do what I told you that I would or I don’t. There are absolutes, life keeps score.

Our political class is too far away from us. They may initially live our lives but I have noticed that the best person can go to Washington and in two years get ground up in the meat grinder that is the Beltway. We need our representatives to be subject to our lives. We need them to be subject to the same health care, same costs, same challenges that we are. Without this, they lose the perspective of the people that they are sworn to represent. It is a lot harder to push policies that are counter to the good of your constituents if you have to justify to your neighbor every day what you did. I believe that we have to find ways to remove that layer of insulation that we have allowed them to give themselves. In this age of the Internet, I can’t imagine why we can’t conduct more of our governance close to home.

Sorry for the Saturday morning soapbox, but I’ve had it. I’ll be on the White House’s enemies list for sure.