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.

Barack Obama…the mirror candidate. He is the product brought about by a society that has grown into a cancer that thrives on scandal and pop culture. Our society has devolved to the point where facts no longer matter, positions are rarely taken with any conviction and style is valued more than substance. These factors have given rise to the empty vessel that is the Democrat candidate.

I call Obama the mirror candidate because for his followers, he is the perfect reflection of what they want to see. No matter the position or the policy, the Democratic faithful see themselves reflected back every time that they look at him. The media is no different, in absence of any firm, clear positions, they are only too eager to ascribe their own hopey/changiness world view to him (because we all know that today’s journalists are not in the biz to report facts, they are out to “change the world”).

I truly believe that this is what Joe Biden meant when the termed Obama as “clean” in the run up to the primaries. Not a physical manifestation of a lack of dirt but a blank slate with no marks, no stated positions that could be used to an opponents advantage, no record and, in fact, no history. Far from being clean as the driven snow he was/is as yet just as antiseptic as the paint on a hospital wall. With a biased and predatory press, this may be the only kind of candidate that can survive a 2 year campaign process.

Many in the squishy middle of “moderate” America feel the same way. In opposition to clear positions staked out by John McCain, many of which they do not like because they imply effort on their part, they prefer to take the path of Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Buckley and Colin Powell and “pray” that Obama doesn’t become a claymation animation with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling the strings. Perhaps that is what the “hope” part of the “Hope and Change” mantra really is.

Voting for a mirror candidate is unconscionable and inherently dangerous. Most people that I talk to about Obama know very little about him. Most supporters have absolutely no curiosity about Wright, Rezko, Ayers, Khalidi, his New Party association, absolutely no interest in his college years and how someone is on the Harvard Law Review and never gets anything published, no curiosity about how he won Illinois elections by effectively eliminating his competition through technicalities.

Since he is such a blank slate, judgments about him have to be made through his associations and in that light the reflection is something far from what the average American sees. His campaign says that is not permissible and in fact, racist but without a demonstrable record, that is the only way to make any legitimate assessment. You are judged by the company you keep. The crowd that has either been thrown under the Obama bus or in the League of People in My Neighborhood are not main street America, these are people who want to change Main Street to Stalin Way.

I understand the reluctance of his supporters to really look at their nominee. I believe that they know what kind of man is behind the mirror. What I see is a malleable entity that is already predisposed to socialism, one that if elected, will be totally consumed by the left leaning leaders of the Senate and House, one that could well destroy the fabric of the free enterprise system and trigger the age of John Galt. I hope that they do look and change their minds.

Although I am an avowed conservative and by association, am a member of the Republican Party, the following is not about party affiliation. It is about being American.

Our leaders have failed us. It has taken some 30 years since the Reagan revolution and the Republican wins in 1994 to expose the farce but now it is complete. We now have to candidates fully representative of this decline in a Democrat who is basically an empty suit filled with meaningless rhetoric and a Republican who is unwilling to engage the support of conservatives to win – in fact, he shows all appearances of not even wanting to win (can you imagine Reagan not taking advantage of the multitude of openings handed to McCain by Obama to expose his fatal flaws?). This is what we have brought upon ourselves in the process of moving to the much touted “middle” (read – mediocrity).

We have elected and supported a political class that routinely says anything necessary to get our votes and then “recalibrates” their positions for power, personal gain and a feeling of “going along to get along”. What passes for progress in Washington is now so far divorced from what is needed for the progress of America that it no longer bears any currency for the average citizen, the average businessman or almost anyone outside the beltway.

The leadership failures (all of them) of the current political class (R’s and D’s) are manifest in one singular failure and that is the failure to keep the USA as the top engine in the world for freedom, economic growth and innovation.  Rush Limbaugh speaks of his belief in “American Exceptionalism” – this is the key.  When one hears the word “can’t” over and over from our leadership, one knows that nobody thinks of us as Numero Uno any more. I challenge you to look back over the last two weeks and count the number of times a public official used the terms “can’t”, “won’t”, “lost” or “shouldn’t” – all negatives indicating in unwillingness or fear of doing something.

The world economy and the world power structure both are basically a pyramid scheme. If you aren’t on the top of the pyramid, you and your populace suffer. For a century, the USA was on top of that pyramid and enjoyed the fruits of that position. The only difference between then and now is that we have lost the belief that being #1 is the right thing to do, that we can responsibly continue to exploit (exploit is not a bad word) our own resources be they intellectual, natural or other to support our economy and we should try to bring freedom to the world (who are we to say that freedom is better than totalitarianism – we can’t judge).

As for the loss of belief in # 1, it is all around us.  From elementary school sports not keeping score or kid’s baseball leagues cancelling All-Star games because it could harm self esteem, to the “Don’t Drill Democrats”…self defeatism in the name of some crazy belief that if we all lose, that equates somehow to “fairness”.  I have a newly formed theory that the reason that our political class doesn’t want to be #1 is because with leadership comes hard decisions – decisions that will not be universally accepted and situations like Iraq, take a moral component to make. This kind of decision is such an anathema to the modern political operative that it is out of the question to make one.

Gas prices have less to do with speculation and supply concerns that they do with the lack of a positive and clear economic message from our leaders. We are very clear as to what we can’t do. We can’t explore for more of our own oil, we can’t win a war, we can’t find Osama, we can’t execute trade agreements with other partners, we can’t use nuclear power…these are all the things that we are telling the world that we can’t do. This has resulted in a dollar at historic lows, interest rates that are driving capital out of our financial institutions, a stock market in free fall. The world looks at us with a very uncertain eye, they are perplexed at our inability to move forward and it is incomprehensible to most countries why we are so unwilling to be #1 in the world when they would give their right leg to be where we are. Failure in leadership, confusion, political agendas – this is what we, as an electorate, wrought.

Where can we go from here?  Here’s my take:

1.       We have to return to a mindset that we, as Americans, are exceptional. No matter what we say, there is not a person out there that says every morning, “I’m going to be average today!”  Even though it has taken a beating over the last 20 years or so, the spirit of exceptionalism still exists, it has just gone underground and taken a back seat to the sham of multi-culturalism.

2.       We need to keep score. The world is …through things like exchange rates, trade deficits, gas prices and political power. The world cares not for our self esteem.

3.       The current political class has to go and the bureaucracy that facilitates it must go as well. With some exceptions on both sides of the aisle, these people have failed us. We need to vote them out and we need to install some methodology of immediate redress when they violate a pledge to their constituents.

4.       Power must be put back in the hands of the people. When people no longer have a direct connection with their representative governance, they lose the ability to govern. We see this in low turnouts for national elections and the rise of “special interest” groups. We have to get government back to the concept that it derives its power from the consent of the governed, not in spite of that consent or lack of because lack of consent is also a decision and sends a message. In these days where one can view anything or purchase anything via the internet from the comfort of our own homes, having our political class isolated in Washington is obsolete. My senators and representatives should be spending 90% of their time in our state and 10% in Washington, not the other way around.

5.       Along with the changing of the political class, the era of “Big Government” has to end. The nature of any organism is to do what it takes to survive and grow and we see this in our current federal structure.  Laws are passed that require other laws and regulations and the agencies to oversee them. Every law has unintended consequences that overtime costs us all some liberty or some of the fruits of our labor.

6.       We have to make decisions and move forward. The cultural perspective that says that everything is relative is a load of garbage; there are “right” and “wrong” decisions.  As a business person responsible for a company, if I took the position that nothing is right or wrong, the business would fail and I would be out of a job.

Until we make a decision to demand better from our elected representatives and hold them accountable for their actions, we will continue to wallow in confusion and indecision. If anyone is happy with the status quo, this is an example of the future if we don’t change.