When General George Washington and his army were settling in at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-1778, the population of the American colonies was less than half of the current population of the city of Chicago. Washington tended to his broken, hungry, half-naked army, and in the summer of 1778 initiated a new campaign against the British.
In the decades that ensued, Washington's generation provided our new nation with an abundant supply of able statesmen: Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison are but a few. Today, the United States can boast of a population in the neighborhood of 300 million, but able statesmen are apparently nowhere to be found.
While the revolutionary generation brought us free-thinking visionaries like Franklin and Jay, our current crop of presidential hopefuls leaves much to be desired. On the democratic side of the aisle, we have a bumbling, slovenly governor, an unprincipled, machiavellian senator, a woefully inexperienced, triple-a prospect, and a preening pansy from the Carolinas. (If I haven't offended your candidate yet, drop a line and I'll think of something). It is difficult to imagine, but the republican field is even worse. Here, we have a Mr. Burns-ish demagogue, a blue-state governor with more waffles than the international house of pancakes, a tick-prone senator from Arizona who cringes at the thought of American foreign policy being influenced by, heaven forbid, the American people, and a Hollywood hot-shot who only looks presidential on TV serial dramas.
And, it isn't just the quality of the candidates that has declined over the generations. The quality of the politics has also been greatly diminished. When General Washington emerged from Valley Forge, the British army had occupied the American capital in Philadelphia. They had sacked New York City. They had amassed the largest army ever to set foot in the western hemisphere, and they were on the march.
Unlike our modern politicians, our founders didn't just shit themselves and go hide in a corner somewhere when the first British ships docked in Boston. They fought back. Even though they understood that failure, for them, would mean certain death, the revolutionary generation and its leaders stood for their principles. They fought along the Hudson, they took the fight to Canada, they brawled through the Carolina backwoods. They fought and scratched and clawed their way to victory and, at last, independence.
Today's crop of politicians and presidential wannabes sicken me. If there is one thing they have in common, it is what they all lack: courage. They lack the courage to fight this President over war funding, even though they are fully empowered to win. Their fears are founded in different truths, but it is fear that drives their actions none-the-less. The republicans fear further fracturing their base by abandoning the President. The democrats fear, brace yourselves for it, bad press. Oh, the horror.
This should come as no surprise, since it is now painfully obvious that leaders of both parties were too chickenshit to tell the truth about Iraq before the invasion occured. Instead, they chose to punt the issue to the President, just as they did with the recent war funding bill, and saddle him with the blame. Because, at the end of the day, avoiding blame and staying in office is valued more highly than human life. God, I think I am going to puke.
My question, as alluded to in the title, is how did it get this bad? When did the operations of our government get so far out of sync with the will of the American people? When did our politicians evolve to the point where they lost their spine, not to mention their conscience? And, this is just me throwing something out there for the hell of it, how do we fix it?