With Us or Against Us?

The Republicans are trying to deceive you.  They're trying to pull the wool over your eyes.  For that matter, so are the Democrats.

This country has been polarized by these two groups of people and that polarization has spread like a plague.  Good U.S. citizens are compelled to choose sides and in doing so become part of the problem and help it spread even further.  Let me tell you something.  Go ahead and pick a side, but keep in mind what they're not telling you is that there are more than just the two sides being offered.

George W. Bush memorably said after 9/11, "You're either with us or against us."  There were some strong emotions prevailing and his message was in tone with the country as a whole, but while it is excusable for the country as a whole to have opinions on foreign policy influenced by a deep crisis of emotion, the same should not be true for our leaders.  Regardless of whether Richard Armitage really threatened to bomb the Pakistanis back into the stone age as they claimed, we can be certain that they felt threatened by the message we know was delivered directly from our president's mouth on public television.

But don't blame Bush.  We have an entire country trained to think in black and white.  Look no further than Michael Moore, not that you could even if you wanted to, the man is a walking one-man hot dog eating contest and the poster boy for a few other deadly sins as well.  In fact, I'm sorry I told you to look at him.  Let's turn our attention to his fans and detractors, as a single group.  Together they manage to lower the collective IQ of the country by a dozen or more points.  His less intelligent fans believe everything he 'implies' while the more intelligent ones will defend his lies of implication by pointing out that he never explicitly said anything that was wholly untrue.

They (and Moore) make the argument about the definition of the word lie and Moore even has the audacity to shrug off people walking out of his films with entirely false notions in their heads as purely coincidental.  Many of Moore's detractors, much like Bush's, are foolish enough to address the arguments being thrown at them instead of the real issues, which are expertly hidden under layers of guile.

Right now you might be thinking that somewhere into this American equation fits you, a concerned and educated citizen who tries to educate themselves on the issues of the day and finds themselves swept up in debate from time to time.  Now that I've effectively insulted the Pro-Bush, Pro-Moore, Anti-Bush and Anti-Moore crowds and there are only a few people left who aren't lighting torches and storming my website let me say this: The Middle Ground is Democracy.

This country was founded on compromise.  The best types of compromise are the ones where everyone is happy, but the second-best kind is the one where no one is.  The extreme left and right are supposed to be kept in check by the moderate.  Let me draw your attention to this handy-dandy example:

In today's world, more and more people are being sucked in by the extremists.  Violence in schools is caused by television and video games!  Bush's tax cuts only help the rich!  Pulling the troops out means the terrorists win!  The USA PATRIOT Act endangers the civil liberties of all Americans!

Chances are fairly good you agree with one or more of those views, but all of those arguments are flawed.  I'm not saying there is absolutely no truth to them, I am saying they are not absolutely true.  Yet, these are the the lines that are being drawn and the sides we're being asked to take.

In the Republican Party the fiscal conservatives of the 20th century have been steadily displaced by a group of people who feel the need to enforce their religious values on the entire country; especially their views on abortion, stem-cell research, homosexuality and evolution.  They specialize in painting people who disagree with them as unreasonable, or if at all possible, un-American.

In the Democratic Party tottering beaurocrats like John Kerry have made a science of paying lip service to everything while accomplishing nothing and those who actually care about what happens to this country, such as Hillary Clinton, charge full-speed-ahead to address pressing issues such as why Grand Theft Auto, as opposed to bad parenting, is responsible for children who are bad-apples.  If it's easy to do and it keeps them in their jobs, rest assured the Dems are doing it.

So what does all of this mean for us?  It looks like our goose is pretty well cooked.  The thing is, out of any country that permits its citizens to vote, we have one of the lowest voter turnout percentages.  Maybe that's because so many of us are disgusted with the options we're given, maybe it's because many of us are too busy, or just don't care enough.  Well make time.

Next month are the mid-term elections.  You know, the ones no one cares about because the President's job isn't up for auction.  I assert that not only should you care, but that these elections offer an opportunity.  Find out who your congressman is if you don't know (and I suspect many of you do not), go to their website and read it.  Then find out who their opponent is and read up on them.  Decide for yourself which one is more likely to accomplish something good while in office (the one who isn't running on a platform of banning something) and when you're done with that, find out about your State Legislature.  You do have one, you know.  It's like a whole other Congress!  Those are the people who make it legal to carry concealed weapons in Texas and play the slots in Nevada.  Take an interest in who's doing what and cast an educated vote.

If you see signs in your area for judges or comptrollers running for county office, find out what those people are doing to make your little slice of America just a tiny bit nicer.  In short, don't let Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken do your thinking for you.  Everyone has an agenda except the people who are blindly following the people who have agendas.  Get your own agenda and let's clean house in November.

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