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.