Apathy

I have been watching as both the Sestak and Romanoff scandals have been making headlines and wonder if the true story is truly being told. Not simply whether or not laws were broken by bribing officials running for public office, but that so many people are writing the issue off as “business as usual”. Even sitting Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell stated that he has done this on many occasions, skirting the edge of the law in order to ensure candidates they want to see in office are the ones that run. I believe the real story is the apathetic reaction from both the media and the public. The lack of outrage is deafening in the fact that this is what we expect from our government and its officials, this is what we have grown used to, the corruption, the bribery, the manipulation of the electoral process to ensure a predetermined result. When you really sit down and think about it shouldn’t you be angry, shouldn’t you feel outraged that the choice of your elected officials is being determined not by your vote but by an elimination of choices to maintain the party power balance? That people in this country are given high paying (paid by the taxpayers) positions simply because the political machine wanted a different individual to have a Senate seat.


Is this not the very issue that every Presidential candidate runs against? They parrot the words the voters want to hear and then simply go about doing “business as usual” because that is the Washington works. Obama got elected trumpeting “transparency” and “change”, but according to an LA Times (hardly a bastion of conservative ideals) article the Obama Administration has denied 50% more Freedom of Information Requests than the Bush Administration did. They hailed promises about letting the people read bills before they were voted on, not even our Representatives got a chance to fully investigate the Health Care Bill before they forced a vote on it. If this is how Washington works, and it is and has for a long time, then I think it is time for a new Washington. One without lobbyists and political manipulation in the election process, one in which the people’s voices really matter, and politicians are held accountable for the votes they make and the favors they do. But unfortunately that will never happen while the American people simply accept the “business as usual” excuse, shrug and move on with their lives, ignoring the direction we are being taken in.