American Politics, where Sound Thinking Kills itself Out of Frustration with Constantly Gab-Babbling Fools — We Are Not Just Riding a Sinking Ship, We’re Actively Putting Holes in Its Hull

© 2012 Peter Free

 

04 June 2012

 

 

Introduction — obvious, but unseen

 

Perspective has a way of changing, when we open eyes and engage brains.

 

What follows is like asking the frog, who is sitting in slowly heating water, to wake up before his complacent disregard boils him to death.

 

 

When intelligent people’s sole purpose is to sell lies, we have a dangerous national leadership problem

 

Would you invite President Obama, Governor Mitt Romney — or any top American political leader to your house — if these people behaved in private as they consistently do in public?

 

In other words:

 

(i) Do your friends irrevocably lie, evade responsibility, and blame others, whenever they open their mouths?

 

(ii) Do your esteemed associates stoke the anti-spiritual and unreasoning fires of the worst and basest of instincts in you?

 

(iii) Are your chosen peers people whom you could not trust, even if you were to confine them to dog kennels in the backyard?

 

If our top American politicians’ private performances equaled the self-serving, manipulative distortions of their public ones, they would all be in jail.

 

 

So — the question

 

How is that United States politics have come to this lowest of low points?

 

Especially so in an age that screams (globally) for genuine leadership?

 

 

A small indicator of our apparently incorrigibly skewed perspective

 

This weekend, I heard a few apparently reasonable pundits defend Governor Romney as a viable choice for president — because he lies so widely, and about such a broad range of subjects, that no one actually thinks that he would do anything extreme.

 

Change Romney’s name to President Obama and you’d have pretty much the same counter-intuitive justification for your vote.

 

You got it.  Apparently the public will be satisfied with a president in 2012, whom no one takes as a serious risk to America’s future because — not in spite of the fact that — he is a pathological liar.

 

Are we all crazy?

 

 

The moral? — Prospects for this nation’s future will not get any better, until we see how we have come to justify egregiously bad behavior on the part of our politicians

 

I do not mind heated disagreements between reasonable and mostly honorable people.

 

But I abhor a political morality that elevates ignorance, fact-evasion, and spiritually destructive behavior to the top of the pedestal of how things should be.

 

Somewhere, the American public has lost its way.  Voters now seem to accept this abysmal state of affairs, as if we had nothing to do with creating them or allowing them to exist.

 

We Americans are not such overly-emotional pin-heads, that we cannot come together to agree on the minimally necessary steps to save an obviously sinking ship.