A Plague on both their houses...

Almost every day, I read comments to this or that news story and I am struck by the number of people who seem to think that the problem with our government is not enough cooperation between the parties, or that both parties are equally corrupt and ineffective and to blame for the problems in our country today.  You know those people.  What I call the "plague on both their houses" types or to coin a moniker: plaguers.  The offer no solutions to the problem, but heap condemnation.

I have come to the conclusion that, in reality, these people are lazy citizens.  Not lazy in the way that they are not hard working, but lazy in their thought processes and political awareness.

Let us take for example our current economic "recovery".  The plaguers would have us believe that: 1. The Democrats haven't done enough to help the economy, and 2.  The Republicans have prevented solutions to the problem.

Let's see, when the Democrats poured almost 1 Trillion in borrowed money into the economy promising that unemployment would not rise above 8 percent, the Republicans had no power to stop them.  Obviously, just by basic observation, it is clear that this money did not do what the Democrats promised that it would do.  Yet, the plaguers don't seem to attribute blame for this failure to the Democrats.

When the Democratic Congress tried to come back for a "second bite" in 2010, the people rose up and gave Republicans control of the house.  It is at this point that the plaguers say the the Republicans became the party of NO!  Blocking the President's "effective" policy solutions.  You know, the ones that worked so well in 2009 and 2010.

Now really, seems to me that these people are either: 1. Stupid or uninformed, or 2. Really Democrats who like to pretend that they aren't.  While I can understand that, the are being disingenuous.

I had a conversation online last night wherein a fellow challenged me, insinuating that I had never voted for a Democrat, therefore making me some kind of a hyper-partisan biased against one party or another.

I tried to explain to him that I was a Conservative, not necessarily a Republican, and that I tried to vote for the most conservative candidate available.  I also tried to explain to him that in many cases in Texas, particularly in county or local elections in the rural area where I live, there is ONLY a Democratic candidate and that I had, as recently as this year, voted for that person.

At that point, I turned the question back on him.  He admitted quite quickly that he was a liberal Democrat and had NEVER voted for a Republican.  Yet, he could not admit the hypocrisy of his question.

When I was in boot camp many years ago, when we were marching and someone messed up, turning the wrong way or getting out of step, the Company Commander would stop us and provide some corrective "motivation".  But if EVERYONE in the company did the wrong thing, no one noticed, and even the CC was left scrambling to catch up.  Thus I learned the lesson:

If everyone is wrong, no one is wrong.

There must be responsibility.  In our two-party system, there has to be political accountability.  You cannot blame everyone for every problem.  You must discriminate the noise and attenuate the message.

There is Right and Wrong in the political spectrum.  Stop being lazy and uninformed and FIND IT!