Politics is No Place for Idealogues. Let's Get Back to the Middle Way

by Tom Barnes, Staff Writer 

I have been on the website here at VT just a month or two but already I have a reputation for being ‘dangerous’ and a ‘Leftist nutjob’ and a ‘Communist sympathizer’ and all sorts of wonderful things. I accept them all if it will open the eyes of my right wing nutjob brothers and sisters who, like me, wore a uniform and suffered injuries of one sort or another.

It is time for all of us to take stock of where we are in our lives as human beings and as a Nation. We are drifting apart based on a series of ideologies that never existed, could not exist and most Americans do not consider pertinent or workable.

As disabled veterans and veterans with some years under our belts, we should understand that there is no right or wrong way to do anything in government, at least not in the extreme. The American Way has almost always been a compromise hammered out by the various regions, political factions and parties and interest groups and a middle way is almost always found. That is what the Bush Administration left in the dust, the middle way. What it embraced was the Far Right Way. That nut from Texas did more to polarize us as a Nation than anyone since Jefferson Davis. And it is obvious that even the Veterans Community in the USA is just as polarized as any other community.

Now we have a new President and hopefully we can find the Middle Way again. It would be just as wrong for this President to swing the Nation to the Far Left as it was for the last President to swing the Nation to the Far Right. And I am a Leftist! But I understand that I am an idealogue. I serve a purpose. I prick the conscience of people who refuse to look at what they have done (that includes me). I am a philosophical bomb thrower. I throw the molotov cocktail of varying views to try and get people to think. But someone like me (OR like Bush or Cheney) should never be elected to public office. We are too extreme in our views.

We do not easily fit into the Middle Way. We serve a purpose but that purpose is never public office. Hopefully we will have learned that lesson by the time this new Administration is finished trying to get us out of an illegal and useless war in Iraq, rebuild the economy and stop the national blood letting between Left (me) and Right (most of the readers on this site).

Americans always want a middle way to be found. They will sometimes listen to extremists but they rarely follow them. There is a reason for that. They have families to raise, jobs to keep and perform and lives to live. I have the time and the temperament to take the extreme view to get people thinking. Most Americans cannot afford that luxury. I understand that.

It is important that we understand how dangerous the Bush years truly were because we can never afford to do that again. He helped ruined our economy, or at least, greatly facilitated the ruin of it. He dragged us into a war based on phony evidence. I personally believe that he was duped by his own people. I don’t believe that he waged this war out of personal malice,

I think Cheney and his gang led him by the nose into the debacle called the Iraq War. He was a caricature of everything foreginers hate about us; the cocky, swaggering, cowboy talking American that bullies his way into getting what he wants. He was us at our worst. I am sorry to have to say this things. I really am. I bear that man no personal ill will.

But he deeply injured this Nation like no other Southernor since the leaders of the Confederacy decided to split the Union. The man was a national menace. He was not someone to hold up as a shining example of American citizenship and world leadership. He surrounded himself with like minded nuts that did tremendous damage to the status of this Nation around the world. They were idealogues but unlike me, they held high office. It was a travesty. We can all see that now.

So what do we do? We simply do not elect idealogues to office anymore. We elect men and women who believe in the Middle Way. And we can get our America back. Bush lost it. We have to find it. I hope Obama can do it. The jury is still out on that fact. I am sick to death of a polarized America and I live and believe in the extreme! What must a real middle of the road American feel? I shudder to think.