American Extremity

The average American is looking around at the bickering and partisanship that is the top story on most network news broadcasts throughout the nation with heated disdain and a shake of the head questioning how a group of people we selected for the task of governance can be so dysfunctional when a failure to raise the debt ceiling runs the risk of crashing the global economy, which is pegged to the United States dollar and forcing our so called leaders to choose between paying Social Security checks, paying for defense spending, or any number of other unenviable choices. You leave a group of seniors without their checks for a month and see if you ever see a political office again. Same deal with the defense budget, were sitting in the middle of two war zones, you can’t just say oh sorry we don’t have the money for Afghanistan this month can you? Something big is getting hammered if we don’t raise the debt ceiling. That my dear politicians is the truth on Main Street. But Main Street, this is also the truth: For this dysfunction, we have no one to blame, but ourselves.

I believe the majority of people who support the Tea Party are good, hard working, honest people who believe in the central truth of the Tea Party message that our government spends entirely too much money and has done so for far too long. The Tea Party movement however, has supported a wide array of candidates who are very far right in their policy positions at the expense of more moderate candidates who supposedly represented the broken system and politics as usual. The last election cycle wasn’t terrific for Democrats either as many Democrats were seen as part of the problem and voted out of office. Unfortunately, the Democrats who survived are frankly further left in their policy positions than the “problem politicians” that the Tea Party won elections railing against Let’s summarize, we have a bunch of far left politicians and far right politicians all steadfastly clinging to their favored positions, while a smaller and smaller minority of moderates are pushed into a dark corner somewhere.

The lesson boys and girls is that government from the two extremes clearly does not work and furthermore when it comes right down to it, there isn’t as big a difference between far left and far right as the talking heads want us to believe.