This sign was shipped to Baltimore, Md. back in December of last year.

The midterm elections are a week from today, and I'm probably more conflicted about voting than I've ever been. On one hand, I have a strong urge to pull the chain - to vote out ALL the incumbents, and let the Dems take over. I just wish I liked them any better than the clowns that are in power now. The problem is that no matter who I vote for, the system is the incumbent. Its the almighty Republicratic Demopublican Party, the same pack of howler monkeys hooting over the same old shit, with the only goal being to keep the voters distracted while they pick our pockets.

Truth? Like Nicholson says in a few good men, "you can't handle the truth." A political figure who tells it like it is, without pandering to the lefties or the Jesus screechers or talking outside the official script, is immediately labled a radical, or an extremist, or a nut, and marginalized and disregarded. The act of running for office in the United States requires selling out on some level, just to use the script required for support of whatever pressure group the candidate wants to be identified with.

Even the so-called "third party" candidates fall into this trap. Look at the Green Party, which is touted as a potential rival to the Demopublicans. In order to be a Greenie, you have to hold - or at least claim to hold - some of their basic ideas, the majority of which consist of juvenile histrionics about corporate greed and sky-is-falling enviro-facsism, along with a good big dose of truly idiotic hippy-dippy notions involving the efficacy of crystals, pyramids, vegetarianism and the regular application of high colonics. The Green Party platform is just the standard Democratic lefty notions taken to their logical conclusions, by which they become separated from anything resembling common sense, and enter the airy heights of utopian fantasy. Yet this is what passes for a semi-serious alternative to politics as usual.

The Democrats are always being accused of not having any "new ideas". Why does this come as a surprise? Long-term Dems don't want to hear any new ideas, at least not those that come painfully close to the truth, which is that the their long-cherished world view is a greasy mush of guilt, victim-worship and envy, leavened by the bitter realization that while much of the world at large may claim to agree with their principles, it will never give up any significant amount of material comfort to bring them into fruition. The whole central idea of being a Democrat is that someone, somewhere, is conspiring to cheat you out of your "fair share" of the material goodies in which our society is awash, and that the only enlightened approach to political economy is to find and punish those who, whether by luck, or connections, or skill - the reasons don't matter, only the results - have more material success than someone else. Individual effort, and its resulting accomplishments, are evidence of a character flaw, unless accompanied by a sense of guilt. For those with the temerity to achieve and NOT feel guilty, well, brother, we'll just see about that! This is the poisonous stew that congeals into such "progressive" ideas such as income redistribution, spawning legislation such as the Millionaire's Tax and other harping, confiscatory idiocy that seeks to level things out, without any acknowledgement of the consequences.

Then their are the Republicans. I speak of the present incarnation of the GOP, which has whored itself out to the so-called Social Conservatives in exchange for political power. In the forty years that the GOP was on the short-handed side of Congress, it learned the hard lesson that strongly-held opinions can only be trumped by other even more strongly-held opinions. Unfortunately, it surrendered the notion that these opinions ought to be based on some valid notion of reality, and traded the honest and sensible philosophy of individual rights and individual achievement for the power of opinions based on superstition, as in authoritarian religious belief. Yet the architects of this trade, mindful that the sort of people who won't put up with the collectivist looting from the Left aren't about to stand being ordered around by jesus-screeching numskulls, have gone to great lengths to cloak their puritannical obsessions in a cloak of "conservative freedom-loving values". To the extent that they have offered an alternative to the milk-toast socialism of the Democrats, this has been successful, but at what a price? The Republicans buy their power from every greasy little fraud in every backwoods pulpit in America, and as a result, instead of honest debate about serious national priorities, we have bloviated arguments over subjects such as gay marriage and creationism in the public schools. As far as I am concerned, any political organization demanding that the superstition-based creation myth of an obscure Middle Eastern tribe be presented as the scientific equivalent of the objective obsevations of Darwin, et al, or that seriously proposes that the legal marriage of a pair of flannel-wearing dykes is the beginning of the end of Western Civilization, deserves nothing so much as my undying revulsion and disdain.