First Post

On November 2, 2008 I talked to my wife about the presidential contest. I knew who I wasn’t going to vote for, but I wasn’t sure who I was going to vote for. I had gone back and forth on whether or not I could actually bring myself to vote for John McCain. At that point I had convinced myself that it was the only thing to do, the only way to live with myself should Barack Obama get elected, something I was sure would happen. That night I told my wife, whose political consciousness only skims the outer membrane of the political universe. Basically, like many Americans, she reads and listens to the headlines and takes them as gospel. She is, watch it now, I am about to coin a phrase, a “remote-control liberal.” She is someone who will flip through MSNBC or CNN, listen to the talking heads, soaks in their spin and skips on to a reality TV show. This is not to say my wife is not intelligent, to the contrary, she is very intelligent. She just doesn’t have the desire or the attention span (maybe whey we get along so well) to get immersed into politics. She has firm convictions, she just isn’t sure why.

So back to election eve 2008. I was discussing the vote with my wife, actually I was begging her to not vote for Obama. I told her I was scared of what would happen if he was elected. I told her that I wasn’t necessarily scared of what he might do, rather, I was scared of what he would allow Congress to do. Little did I know what lied beneath. I was worried about tax increases and a continuing poor economy. I was either ignorant of the true horror about to unfold or not bright enough to foresee it. Either way, I failed in my attempt to sway her.

Of course back in the present day, we now have people in power who think that common Americans who oppose this administration’s health care plan are: un-American, too well dressed to be real, Nazis, astro-turfers, tea-baggers, political terrorist, racists and the like. Yes, common every day Americans like you (not like me because I don’t have the political gumption to get out and protest like these honorable Americans) are attacked. Mind you, these attacks are not coming from the extreme left wing mouths on radio, tv and the internet, ok, well, not just from those locations. This is coming from the leaders of the Democratic Party. Its one thing for the likes of Ann Coulter or Sean Hanity (or myself for that matter) to call out protestors at anti-war demonstrators. It would be another thing for Mitch McConnell, John McCain or even Newt Gengrich to say things like that. Imagine the fake outrage that would have been coming from the cable news talking heads had Roy Blunt or Bill Frist said something like that about anti-war protestors when things were going really bad in Iraq.

Lets be honest, those two men and the other Republican leaders in Congress during the first two years of the second Bush term are really to blame here. They had the power and the political capital to reigned in and straighten up the Bush administration when it was going off of its wheels. They could have passed legislation that would have reigned in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They could have passed Social Security reform. Rather than do things that would have bettered America, they wanted to ram through mis-guided immigration reform (we will use that term loosely) and get sucked into the pit of corruption the likes of which the Democrats could never have even dreamed of. That lead to the people ousting the Republicans in 2006 and installing Harry Reid and Nancy Peloci and a Democratically controlled Congress for the last two years of Bush’s presidency. This bring me to the highlight of Republican failure, well, at least since the 1992 presidential election. The two years prior to the 2008 election, Congress did nothing, nothing. Congress had approval ratings that were as low or lower than President Bush! Yet, somehow the Republican party could not muster up a fight and lost more seats in Congress and lost the White House to a first term Senator who has the governing experience equal to that of my Chihuahua. Is it any wonder that so many people like me who were Reagan Republicans are pissed because our party left us (pun intended).