Is Democracy being wasted by/on Americans?

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.    - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Recent news reports are saying that the majority of Americans now disapprove of President Obama’s handling of the economy.  Worse, according to these same reports, a growing number of Americans are said to be preparing to vote for Republican candidates in upcoming elections.  Say what?  And, this is the Democrat's and Mr. Obama’s fault………how?

Where the hell have these people been?!  How could they think that electing Republican candidates could possibly be the answer to a Republican-caused problem?!  Doesn’t anyone remember the humongous quantities of BS coming out of W’s Whitehouse?  Has everyone forgotten how healthy our economy was under Bill Clinton?

 

Now, I stole the cartoon recently sent to me by a Republican friend, and include it here to make a point.  Y'all probably think that this is supposed to be the position taken by the Democrats, as some kind of excuse for what is happening in Washington.  From my perspective, this is simply reality.  The present ills of our nation are all directly attributable to W and his eight disastrous years in office.  So, yes, I believe that Mr. Obama is living a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in that he cannot bring about all the change that is needed because he is not getting the help he should be getting from either his Congress or his electorate.

(Now, back to our originally scheduled rant):

Am I the only one who remembers a feeling, that gave way to actual declarations, and I thought, action that indicated that maybe the American people had finally wised up to the point that maybe, just maybe, we were going to stop reelecting the same old sorry liars, but were going for a clean sweep that would get rid of incumbents, and lead to some fresh approaches?  I mean, wasn’t that what Obama’s election was supposed to represent?  Didn’t the candidates all promise that they were going to do things differently (including Mr. Obama)?  So, what the hell has happened?

I am well aware that the current crop of office holders has made no effort to keep any of their empty promises.  I am well aware that Lobbyists continue to thrive, and spread their special brand of sickness, and that means the current office holders are no more resistant to their outright bribes than were the former office holders.  I am also well aware that the Pentagon continues to hold too much power, and to exercise too much influence over those latest idiots we elected to Congress.

What I truly do not understand is how it could be that every news source imaginable reports – over and over – that the American people are not happy with their elected officials, and that the American people want to see some real change from the old status quo, no one is happy with what is happening (or, better, NOT happening) in Washington, D. C.  Yet Congress just goes on, spending money that we don’t have, passing more and more laws that always have special interests at heart (at the same time that there remains a general failure to enforce the old, existing laws), and failing to make any effort to accede to the public will.  If we elected these bastards, and they don’t do what they said they would do, and what they said they understood we wanted them to do, why aren’t we holding some recall elections, and why would we be talking about “next time, I will vote for the other party’s candidate,” instead of maybe looking for a non-party candidate?

Maybe it is time to consider regaining the true value of our franchise, by demanding better candidates from wherever they might want to come.  Maybe it is time to simply begin massive write-in campaigns by common people, willing to declare themselves to be independent of either political party.  Maybe it is time really throw the bums out.