Will We Ever Breath Fresh Air Again?  The dramatic impact of low-to-no information voters in the last election cycle coupled with the drip-drip-drip of Obama administration scandals leaves one disillusioned and jaded.  Unfortunately, when faced with the disgust of how corrupt and ethically-challenged this Administration is, one turns to the alternative and sees…..the Republicans.  The Republicans…who differ only in a few principles; but differ very little in practice.  Here we have on the one hand the Democrats, whose insatiable quest for tolerance leads them to a type of leadership that is full of arrogance and a race to see who can withstand the greatest indignity and on the other hand the Republicans, who feign outrage in a self-righteous vein while behaving just like the Democrats behind the scenes.  I think that is the one main difference I have seen between the two parties in my lifetime; Democrats find a way, any way, to win and see no shame in it; while Republicans continue to bring knives to gun fights.   Ultimately, they are members of the same club, but just present different fronts.

It is really, really difficult to see how this cesspool of a culture that we currently have in WDC will ever change.  Bush had eight years to do it, some of those with control of both houses of Congress, and did not move the needle.  For all of his lofty and hollow rhetoric, Obama has done nothing to move the needle either; it has likely regressed a bit during his watch.  When we look at the candidate prospects for the next presidential election, is there any reason to expect anything different?  What reasonable person should expect a different style of Executive leadership when we continue to draw our candidates from the same contaminated sample?  Republicans and Democrats alike continue to recruit their party leaders based on pocketbook and influence-peddling abilities while choosing their candidates from their training academies that school the students in the old “party first, country second” mantra. 

It is a terrible attitude to carry, but I fear that our nation’s government must endure a terrible tragedy in order to right itself.   A wise friend once told me that sometimes a train must wreck in order to fix itself properly.  Until the informed (and uninformed!) voters of this nation reach a stage of total disgust with our current two-party leadership in this country, demonstrate that disgust in some fashion that transfers real pain to the two parties, and begins to seek their new leaders from a source other than the two-party (not necessarily a third party) training system…I fear we will continue to devolve as a nation, see the morass in WDC deepen and widen, and continue to hurtle in an ever-increasing fashion towards that point of no return.  Government as it currently exists may very well be too large to tame.  A clear first step is to shrink it, get it down to a manageable size, and then begin to attack the cancer that is destroying it.  I am talking about practice here; not policy.  What our Government has become is not a Democrat or a Republican thing; it is a corruption thing, pure and simple. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Obama administration will be to create the train wreck that leads to a proper fix.

How Did We Get Here?  "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" arose as part of a quotation by the expansively named John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902).   "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."  I am afraid that the Obama administration, like a few before it, has become a poster child for Mr. Acton’s theory.

As pathetically impotent and biased as they have become, the sad truth is that the press is essentially the only firewall between the common man and absolute political corruption.  Consider the overwhelming media in today’s real-time, 24/7 news cycle world, couple that with the rapid increase in low-to-no information voters, and you have a formula for what we witnessed in the last election cycle.  By any objective standard, Mitt Romney was one of the most qualified presidential candidates in history.  Given his qualifications and resume, given the challenges that currently beset this nation, he was indeed the perfect man for our times.  But for whatever reason, the press determined early on in the process that Obama would be re-elected; and as part of that decision, they abdicated their power and responsibility in order to secure that determination.  Shame on them; the chickens are now coming home to roost.

As we saw with Nixon, a President who becomes drunk with power quickly loses sight of any moral or ethical obligation to transparency.  With his minions following his every word in lockstep, and going about their self-preserving missions independently, this Administration has decided to maintain control at all costs.  Any action, regardless of ethical, moral, or even (perhaps?) legal implications, was deemed appropriate to keep The Hand on the lever of power and push the agenda that was divine beyond question.

As this harvest of shame continues and the press finally begins to unravel this pitiful tapestry, I would hope that they will take a moment or two along the way to reflect on their massive and unforgiveable failure to be the non-partisan and objective guardians that they should be…and should have been.  We should not expect the press to be perfect; but is it too much to expect them to be honest?  The absolute corruption that Mr. Acton referred to has, in this case, not only applied to the Obama administration; it has equally applied to the press who has checked out on their important role in this nation and drank the kool-aid so generously furnished by the One.

The List is Growing.  I am not fan of Barrack Obama; his behavior, his ethics, and his performance.  I am not a huge fan of the Republican Party either; but it is presently the lesser of two poor choices.  I feared that a second Obama administration would feel so empowered by hubris that they would veer into dangerous territory regarding executive actions.  Unfortunately, recent news developments indicate that the veering began well before the second-term election.   Let us count four of the ways.

An amateur YouTube filmmaker is dragged out of his home by gray shirts in the middle of the night (yes…this is literal) under the guise that he is primarily to blame for the Benghazi attacks.  Now it has become clear that not only was he not the primary cause of this tragedy, but this Administration knew that from the beginning and fabricated/nourished this fairy tale to purposely mislead the American public; with, I might add, the mainstream media (Candy Crowley anyone?) on board as co-conspirators.  This should not only alarm any sane person concerned about citizens’ rights in the country, but is also indicates a severe lack of awareness or concern by this Administration about honestly, ethics, and morals.

This Administration (and their Fed puppet master) continues to prop up this economy with federal hiring, federal spending, and massive currency pumping.  How long the bubble can be maintained is anyone’s guess, but the longer we wait for the “pop”, the worse the implications will be.  Once again, go to any mainstream media outlet and you see the rosiest spin possible on any economy-related number, while fostering a veil of self-denial for the darkness coming that is hidden in any reasonable analysis of the data.

Obamacare continues to accrue baggage as it stumbles towards some type of implementation.  So far, the baggage has been invisible to the public because it is primarily behind the scenes and mostly associated with preparation for upcoming events.  However, once those upcoming events become reality, the true suffering and economic damage from this colossal legislative blunder will become all too apparent to the nation as a whole.  Putting this big, fat genie back in the bottle will be a task that will be monumentally difficult, but equally unavoidable.  The ultimate tragedy is that so much of the bill’s content could have been accomplished in a deliberate, intelligent, and bipartisan fashion had this Administration been willing to spend a bit of political capital and place a portion of its gargantuan ego in the back seat.

And now comes the coup de gras; we find that the IRS, leading up to the last election cycle, was targeting conservative organizations in an adverse fashion.  This belated confession comes with the qualifier that it was done without political motivation, but what other possible, conceivable explanation could there be?  Of course it was done for political reasons.  If the use of such a powerful and omnipresent federal agency as the IRS by a sitting Administration for naked political gain does not concern you, then you are a great candidate for Soviet or Chinese citizenship.

History will record that this is not only one of the worst Administrations in history based on its accomplishments, but it appears quite likely that it will also go down as one of the most ethically and morally bankrupt Administrations this county has ever known.  And when that chapter is written, those self-professed guardians of the truth, known as the mainstream media, should have co-billing right along with them.