by Michael Skinner

Created on: August 29, 2009   Last Updated: March 10, 2010

US politicians trade upon the greed and gullibility of the electorate. Most elections in the US are built upon fallacies sold by both political parties. The left sells the fallacy that you can have everything you want and some rich guy some where will pay for it. The right operates on the fallacy that God wants us to start certain wars and enrich certain people while we are fighting them. Both the left and the right operate on the fallacy that governments are instituted among men to control the lives other men that you don't agree with.

How do you hold someone accountable for telling you the very lies you wanted to hear? One of the primary lies told by both sides of the political aisle is that someone besides you is responsible for your problems. For instance, the left will tell lazy and stupid people that they are poor not because they are lazy and stupid but rather because some hard working guy stole the money that was rightfully theirs. The right will say that terrorism happens because some guy in a desert somewhere hates your way of life.

The left is lying because all their constituents could have better lives merely by not having children out of wedlock and finishing school. The right is lying because we pay the terrorists who attack us by buying oil from them. If we stuck to our own oil and coal, the terrorists would dry up and blow away.

Politicians ought to be held responsible for leaving the border open to terrorists after 911 and for letting an invasion of 20 million illegal aliens come in and take American jobs in a time or recession. But no one blames the politicians for these things.

There was a time in the old Roman Empire where the state provided bread and circuses to keep the populace from noticing the incompetence and corruption of the government. These days the circus is reality TV and the Internet. We are constantly barraged by what silly tarts and drugged athletes are doing. The bread part of the equation is a promise of free health care or the promise that you too will get to do something about the hoax of Climate Change or the Scam called Global Warming.

There is a chance, a very small chance that the people will notice that almost none of the stimulus money went to stimulate the economy and almost all of it went to make government larger and stronger and to strengthen various Marxist political action groups. However, since the economy will recover anyway-these things are cyclical-the politicians will lie and say their spending ended the recession and most of the populace, having lost the ability and the will to do even rudimentary arithmetic, will buy the lie.

With any luck the Tea Parties will sweep into power and throw mad dogs of both major parties out into the street.

Learn more about this author, Michael Skinner.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.