When I was growing up in the Peoples Republic of
Taxachusetts (Massachusetts for everyone not from New England), there used to
be an old political joke passed around; "A Republican is a Democrat who's been
mugged."  Of course there was some truth
to the statement and it came about when Michael Dukakis was running for
president in 1988; the state's bills weren't being paid, money was being tucked
away in bank accounts "creating" a false surplus.  The state then paid dearly for the next three
years in economic terms with a horrible downturn. 

Lately I've been questioning where I fit in the political
spectrum.  I started out as a liberal who
was always protesting one thing or another. 
When it came to the 1988 election cycle, I voted for Kerry and Kennedy
for the Senate, but George 41 for president. 
In 1992 I had a hard time pulling the lever for Bush, and instead gave a
protest nod to Ross Perot.  In 1996, I
held my nose and gave a party nod to Bob Dole, wondering the entire time "is
this the BEST they could've done against Clinton?"  By 2000 I had been living in Texas for a few
years, knowing that if Bush 43 got tapped to run, our state would be in rolling
in the pork barrel cash projects and I wouldn't be worrying about the
unemployment lines for at least four years. 
In 2004, I held my nose and winced hard when it came to voting Bush 43
into a second term; he had left Texas so dry of economic prosperity, the
buildings were crumbling and blowing away like tumbleweeds.  I had voted Kerry in once and I refused to
make that mistake again on such a grand scale. 

I can no longer say I'm a republican, and I'm certainly not
a democrat.  To checkmark "independent"
is useless because there are no good candidates due to the republicans and
democrats squeezing out the third party options.  I don't believe I'm a libertarian because I
don't like some of the issues they stand for. 
I do think I'm one of a growing number of voters who are sick and tired
of not having real choices.  How come I
can have it "my way" at Burger King as a customer, but I become a slave under
the government with no real choice when these guys are my employees?  My post tax dollars mean more to a burger
joint than my employees?  What a poor
commentary on the system.

Remember the good old days when democrats used to tax and
spend your money away like drunken sailors on a 48-hour pass in Bangkok while
the republicans cried in their beers, dreaming of the day they'd turn it all
around.  "We'd fix the entire system if
we had a majority in the House and Senate!" 
This may have been true when it came to the rank and file foot soldier,
but not for the elected republicans who never starved despite being out of
power.

Yesterday's drunken sailor with a 48-hour pass looks at
today's Republican party and muses quietly, "They've got it better than I ever
had it!"  Everyone's tied to the Jack
Abramoff scandal.  Cheney's got himself
wrapped up in Halliburton and Lockheed Martin. 
Rumsfeld's got his war profiteering nest egg with his stock in Tamiflu.  The GOP scandals are
being logged in scorecard formats. 
If all that's not sour enough on your taste buds, knowing the
President's for torture and domestic spying should sufficiently frost your
cake. 

I'm still at a loss to figure out what happened to my
party.  The neo-conservatives seem to
have sprung up out of nowhere like a poison ivy patch.  I keep hearing that old fifties' song,
"…you'll be scratching like a hound, the minute you start to mess
around….poison ivy….poison ivy…late at night while you're sleeping, poison ivy
comes a creepin' around."  The more you
politically itch, the worse the special prosecutor has to scratch, and this
kind of rash spreads everywhere.

I still can't figure out what happened in the 1990's that
quietly gave birth to this political kudzu of sorts.  We like to self medicate ourselves into
believing it happened post 9/11/01, but politicians rarely move that fast or
are that organized; even midnight pay raises take some wrangling.  We were set up with the right wing media
blitz that ran a classic "hail Mary" pass in the name of equal time on the
radio. 

If you stop and critically think about this for a minute,
it's not hard to see Rush Limbaugh and other angry sounding mouthpieces from
the right dominated the airwaves.  They
had plenty of fodder with President Clinton in terms of his policies as well as
his personal mistakes.  During this time,
however, the republicans were extremely quiet – as if the right wing talk show
fronts had given them the smokescreen thick enough to work behind.  Very few neo-conservative documents seem to
been exposed until well after 9/11/01, but by then I wonder if their agendas
hadn't already come to pass.  By seeing
these documents so long after their creation, we were essentially "Monday
morning armchair quarterbacking" after the game had been played. 

Of course many republicans will say, "yeah, what's wrong
with that?  We captured the
trifecta!"  The problem lies with a few
old sayings: "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and "power is the ultimate
aphrodisiac".  It's not a game, it's not
a spreadsheet…there are real people involved who are going to be hurt in the
process.  It's not about numbers; it's
about responsibility and service to those who elect you.  It's become about a cushy retirement fund and
lifetime medical benefits.  Isn't this
welfare, but under a different name? 

There comes a time when you have to look at what you know
and compare it with what you thought you knew, and then size it up against what
you expected.  Something is very wrong in
this country.  Republicans have gone off
skipping with Jim Jones and drinking Kool-Aid, and the Democrats can't find
their butts with both hands, a road map, a mirror and a cheering and cheating
section.  It's like watching "Dumb and
Dumber" (with subliminal messages of "vote republican in November or the
terrorists will get you!"), only when you go to the concession stand, the
popcorn and coke cost you the national budget.

If a republican is just a democrat who has been mugged, what
is a republican who has been corporately mugged by the ultra neo-conservative
think tanks, war profiteers and special interest political action
committees?  A sucker if he votes them
back in.   

This country needs to wake up and start endorsing viable
third party candidates and stop fearing the split vote in a simple majority
system that should be reflected in the way the Electoral College votes in each
state.

And while we're at it, let's go back to simple paper ballots
with markers and no chads.  The election
fraud has been rampant and downright embarrassing; it's hard to say we're
founded on democratic principles when elections
are stolen by electronic voting machines and the re-emergence
of Jim Crow voting laws.  I wondered
why President Bush said recently he needed to "brush up" on the renewal of the
voting rights act and then it unfortunately all made sense: what do you bet
it's going to get a "Karl Rove extreme makeover" to keep traditional black
democrats away from the polls?