I'm Back!

I know that I've been really sporadic about blogging (not that many, if any, have noticed at all) but I just got a netbook mostly for writing. I want to write some essays but I also have some story ideas that I'd like to work on and all of this will likely include some blogging too. I've even thought about publishing some of my writing here on my blog or on my “Anonymous” blog I'm going to keep. (I won't divulge that location because it wouldn't really be anonymous.)

One of the main things that I'd like to start off with is my fatigue with the shenanigans in Washington (D.C. that is). I'll admit that I am an Obama supporter. I have been almost from the moment that I met him and my switch from being more conservative to more liberal started a few years ago when I read the the book “The Corporation” by Joel Bakan.

Now I don't want to get into that story here and now (the two combined because I may later and even here). The things that I am tired of is the power struggle between parties that leaves the people in the middle in a crossfire of polarizing ideas and vitriol that most people don't care about.

I've talked about this idea with a co-worker that is probably my politically mirror opposite but we've agreed that the current two party system is pretty unappealing to most people. When the Republicans and the Democrats get together and hammer out ideas and “planks” in their party platforms there is little overlap so voters are largely left to choose one side over the other. I realize that there are regional differences but I'm trying to not be overly specific in my generalizations.

What I think people need is a third party that isn't formed based on just one principle. There are parties like The Green party, The Libertarian party and so forth that appeal to a very small base of voters. What I think we need is a None Of The Above party that appeals to the middle and doesn't necessarily stand for the same things all the time. For example, the Republicans are usually in favor of more defense spending and the Democrats are usually against. In the 80s while we were fighting the Cold War and now with the War On Terror (such an unfortunately open-ended phrase) the idea of increased defense spending makes sense. In between those two periods the expenditures didn't need to be as high. A party that would accept those realities and embrace them makes sense to me.

I also know that the defense spending argument is easy to make in hindsight it should have been a little more obvious and rational to tell the defense department they were going to get a little less in the mean time. They'd still get money for R&D and to maintain what they need to maintain but any group on a budget is always going to want more money and use what they get. This isn't something that just the government does.

But the difficulty of building a party in the middle is that bold ideas that appeal to one extreme or another and those would largely be missing; the attention getting and appealing ideals present wouldn't be there. Also any intrusion on the power held by either party would be perceived as a political threat and be attacked which wouldn't be so bad as long as the purpose was served: the purpose of ending bickering for the sake of reclaiming power and returning Washington, D.C. back to a place where people compromise for the common good.