The Turning...

I find myself having more and more in common with the Republicans than with the Democrats. I am of the disenfranchised center-of-the-road wing of the party and, even worse, hail from a geographic area which the national Democratic Party has ceded to the Republicans for the foreseeable future. Though with the Dem leadership's hard lean toward the left, they are less and less a party that I can condone or call my own. We as a nation are better off when the leaders of both parties are Centrists and a wider majority of us have our views bandied about at the higher levels. The Right and Left have learned that to get elected they have to run toward the middle. Then, after being elected, they drift back to their position of stasis.

Brother Craig was right. I was confused in my political leanings when we all first got to know one another. I wasn't changing, but the party was changing about me and beneath my feet.

The party that elected Jimmy Carter doesn't exist anymore. Bill Clinton's two elections were an aberration in the cycle. Clinton was from the South and through personality, if nothing else, he was able to draw votes from swing states. It wasn't about political ideals. It was about his being able to talk a poor man into giving him his last dollar or an intern into giving him a...well you get the idea. Gore was the strongest candidate to compete against Bush. Kerry, though a fine Massachusetts Senator, couldn't.

I have stopped my reception of the Democrats.com newsletter. Everything that I disliked about Fox News's Rightist stance is mirrored in this newsletter from the Left. It's too Left. And now, after months of "Impeach Bush NOW" sloganeering...well...not on my computer screen anymore.

The whole "After Downing Street" movement is a waste of time. Sitting U.S. Presidents don't get impeached for the kinds of things currently perceived as wrong in the Bush Administration. Yes, you heard it here, I am defending President George W. Bush.

Wake up and smell the Civics lesson. I may not love Bush, but he's what we've got for 2 more years.

If we were going to toss politicians out of office because they lied to their constituencies, Washington DC would be a ghost town.

If the Dems were truly concerned, then, steps should have been taken much earlier. A higher quality candidate with broader based appeal than Kerry should have been ran against Bush for the Presidency. I'm not disputing Kerry's credentials. He is a great East Coast Liberal Senator, but where's his appeal to old school Southern Democrats, the forgotten, amputated arm of the Democratic Party.

For the Liberal wing of the Democratic Party to be dominant, the Southern wing had to be culled. Well, I'd say they've succeeded to a large degree. The Southies represented the more conservative wing of the party, the more religious wing of the party...both positions that have been ceded to the Republicans in the national arena.

I'll always consider myself a Southern Democrat, in deference to my grandmother and the way she raised me, but more and more I'll be voting as an Independent. I've never voted a straight party ticket in my life and, truly, feel that it shouldn't even be an option. You have to vote your conscience and just blindly voting for someone because they are on the same team as you isn't right.

So, more and more, I find myself a Southern Democrat in name only. An endangered species. A blue state exile in a red state, who finds himself shading more towards purple all the time.

How many of you out there, south of the Mason-Dixon line, feel the same way? More and more, I'd bet.