The problem isn't the president. Its corruption of ALL government officals. Republicans, Democrats, all of them. It becomes so easy to take Lobbies from these dickheads from everything from Oil to Tobacco. Corruption is what America does NOT stand for. The senate and the congress have become so corrupt that they ignore the Rights and Rules the Constitution that they have become a danger to the American people.
The expression I got from everything was a bunch of Republicans crying about taxes and how their party lost most of their seats because they were asshats. But anywho....
If all the offices of government are corrupt, no amount of protesting will repair it. Also, if Texas was allowed to secede then it'd likely have the same officials in many of its offices, thus the corruption continues.
Thus the only real two choices:
1: Get involved in politics and stop waiting for some other politician to step in. All politicians are snakes. Though it would also make you a snake, maybe you'd be a snake that remembers what you're doing there. Because if you don't get involved and do it, nobody will.
2: Your forebears left you the ability to violently overthrow the government should it become corrupt. Look it up, there's various quotes from your founding fathers admitting it would one day happen and that only violence could oppose it. It's why you have the second amendment.
It's not just the taxes. It's the Tenth Amendment, the Second Amendment, the First Amendment, even the abuse of the Fourteenth Amendment. The problem I have is that the Federal government is trampling on the rights of the states and the people. This collectivist mindset is killing the individual emphasis that has made America strong. The government is intended, and was intended from the start, to be a limited government. When the government goes beyond their enumerated powers, it is the responsibility of the people to attempt to resolve the matter peacefully if possible. That is what the Tea Parties were about.
Wes, if everyone involved understood the situation as you do and could so eloquently describe it in detail (even if I disagree with your 1770's parallel) I can assure you that we, the outsiders looking in, would have much more faith in you, the American peoples, ability to comprehend and resolve the problem...
... however; if you watch the news, catch the interviews with the networks "investigative journalists" what you come away with, at least I have, is that America has become completely polarized by the idea that political agendas can only be left or right, conservative or liberal and that paradigm of over simplification of social behaviour creates and atmosphere where the most ignorant, uninformed people can get up on a soap box and further constipate any given issue.
Speaking as a Canadian, which is to say one of the roughly 5.5 billion people in the world who isn't an American (well, Northern North American maybe) I have to say that we, the rest of the world, are getting a strong impression that America is down right fucked up... a lot like Quebec, a lot like the bloc.
Beff, Park, I have to agree with you there. When people put more emphasis on, and are more interested in, the latest celebrity rather than politics, their favorite sports team over world events, and American Idol over a local election...
So where were your Tea Party protests when George Bush was extending his government to absurd levels while curtailing the freedom of the press and eliminating the rights of private Americans to make private phone calls without having the NSA listening in?
Bush was their guy, so of course they're going to curtail their outcry... even in the face of absurd abuse and incompotence and only speak up when things get really out of hand.
Now though, it's not their guy... so the smallest thing is all it takes to get them out in droves making ludacris complaints. And just so you Yanks (and Confederates to a lesser degree) know what's what... Canada, federally and provincially has been subject to tax hikes of comparative value and our reply? We demanded disclosure; we wanted to know where it was going, where it was being spent.
