Party Warfare

I had one of those moments today where a light comes on and I see something from a perspective I haven't seen before. I was reading a CNN article about the comment Cheney made a few weeks ago about America not being as safe now that Obama is in office. The article wasn't anything really exceptional and I began reading some of the comments made by readers. The comments were the typical liberal and conservative comments with a few more middle grounders chiming in. The anger and the hate becomes apparent on both sides and then I read one comment about all of the rights we lost under Bush. I read the comment and began to feel the conservative rise up in me as I began to go off in my mind about how the rights we've lost under Obama make the rights we lost under Bush and the Patriot act look small. Then I paused and it hit me. My reaction was the problem. The reaction of all of those people in the article are part of the problem. The reaction I'm talking about is the party politics. Each side finds their villain and makes their case for why all of the evil in the world is perpetrated by the villain and as a result the villains party is evil. Clinton was evil, Bush and Cheney were evil, Gore was evil, Harry Reid is evil (he really is but that is another post for another day). And then once we've identified the villain we go out and sound our war cry. And what happens is the party of the villain feels like they need to defend them. They can't be the villain because then our party is wrong and our party can't be wrong. Here is a news flash that shouldn't be a news flash to republicans. George Bush did a lot of stupid things. He did some good but he did a lot of dumb things. We lost rights as American citizens under George Bush. you may want to argue that we had to lose them to make us safe. You might be right but in the end there is a cost for freedom and we paid the price by trading our liberties for safety. Fine. But the real issue is we lost rights. Under Clinton we lost freedom and under Obama we are losing our freedom. We are too busy fighting our party warfare that we miss the entire point, our government is slowly, bit by bit taking away our freedoms and they are using our party bickering to their advantage. That is one of the reasons why I really like the 912 project. The return to the principles of our founding fathers is the only thing that can save this country. Our founding fathers didn't agree on a lot of things but what they did agree on was liberty and the importance of freedom. I think every American should take note and a good hard look at what is important. Is it more important that the worse villain works for the other side, or is it more important that we recognize that our freedom is what matters most.