Comment 14 by 78rpm :

Finally heard from another American who is pulled in two directions like me (Comment 11 by Free2011). I'm a Republican too, and I don't know how the hell to vote this time around, with the Republican party taken over by theocrats. I'm almost ready to defect....

There are many of us pulled in two directions these days.

I am a registered Republican, but I do not consider myself a "Republican". I am a "Democratic-Republican", the party founded by the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The Republican party of the tradition of The Grand Old Party died when Barry Goldwater lost his bid for the Presidency, in part because he would not support this brand of theocratic religious extremism that at least five of the current Presidential candidates for the Republican Primary are advocating for. In fact he spoke out against it on many occasions.

I'm a Republican because I support smaller government involvement in the market and in private affairs, and I support fiscal responsibility. But the Republican party, or at least those who are most outspoken as "Republicans", are not small government, fiscally responsible conservatives. They are Neo-Conservative oligarchs who advocate a religious takeover of the government of the United States. They are liars, thieves, hypocrites, and in my honest opinion, traitors to this nation and its supreme law.

But the Democratic party is no better in this. The Democratic party would have us slaves wholly dependent upon government programs for our sustenance. They would have us worship the specter of pillaging socialism which has bankrupted the most vulnerable nations of the European Union, just as its more militant cousin, communism, bankrupted the former Soviet Union. At the same time, a marriage between socialist entitlement and fascist warmongering has brought the largest economy in the world to its knees.

The United States is clearly in very serious trouble. Most of its would-be leaders are criminals, and many of them traitors to every ideal of liberalism this nation was founded upon. Its people are afraid for the future, and rightly so. Its friends throughout the world are at least nervous about its government's irresponsibility, warmongering and political in-fighting, including this insane struggle between reason and the blind, idiotic faith that these warmongering, religious extremist oligarchs want to supplant the Constitution with as the nation's supreme law.

We're in trouble. I would go so far as to say we are in dire straits.

I don't know what I expect from the 2012 presidential election, except perhaps that this Republican primary election will most likely be the last nail in the coffin of my affiliation with the Republican party and with American politics in general. After all, why should I continue to pretend that I have any representation in a government that is wholly corrupt at its financial core, forcefully totalitarian in its means to ends, and wholly hypocritical in its ethics?