Politics

I don't need to remind any American what day it is. Too many posts are spent looking back...I choose to spend this one looking at the state of things right now. Wow. I've been reading the news, and the comments below the news, and it always seems to make me want to blog. I mean really, are we as a people so divided on basic facts (evolution as a science, abstinence education, Iraq as a war from God!!) that we cannot sit down and discuss what should be ideas with a basic sense of humanity? It seems to me like the more political spin gets put on things, the less it becomes about what our leader will do and more about who they are, what they're wearing, how they're going to uphold our deeply held values.
Honestly, I want the government to stay the hell away from my deeply held values. Less government. There, I said it, and now I sound like a libertarian, but it's true. Bureaucracy is known for how deeply they can screw things up - why do I want more government laws? They're not passed in my best interests (hello exonoration of the phone companies who did the phone taps, hello Patriot Act, hello TSA and their incompetence) so why even waste the money?
If government were truly acting in our best interest and upholding Christian values or whatever the hell they call it, they'd stop legislating and start doing. Make it a part of being a congressman to get out there and do public service. Volunteer for soup kitchens, build houses, work in a medicaid office. Those are the public servants and they work damn hard with what little budgets they get.
I am a realist. I don't knock people who have religion - faith is a beautiful thing. But that's not the realm of government, and never should be. After all, most Christians would detest having a government-sponsored religion such as England, where the ruling monarch is the head of the church. Why would you even have the hubris to assume that you know what God wants in our government? Why is God in the government so important to the basic population of America, such to the point that the Republican party is now the Faith party? It doesn't make sense to me. Is this still the conservative backlash for the liberalism of the 70s?
This post probably doesn't make sense - I'm tired, and all this is touching on a very complicated topic: why people base their choices only on themselves. It's one thing to use yourself as a reference point, but has American individualism come to such a point where the "other" guy is no longer even of any importance? If so, I can see it coming from our culture quite clearly, but is there any way to use this "moral" streak the Republicans have capitalized on to do something besides make a lot of corporations a lot of money? Face it, that's what they're doing. Feeding America the bible on one hand and lining pockets with the other. But have we become too selfish to see that as a bad thing?