Up until the last decade or so, if you asked someone which came first country or party, they would almost always say country. The utterly sad reality is that is no longer the case. Far too many of us now say their party affiliation is much more important, in fact they believe that those in the other party or the enemy! How did we get to this condition? That is the topic of this post.

Of course one of the prime causes is the current Oval Office occupant. He has only two things in mind. One is to do whatever Fox News tells him to do. The other is to do nothing that doesn’t glean support from his base. The other 70% of the country be damned, they simply are not part of his compassion if he even has any compassion. To a sane person, this modus operandi is insanity for he knows as a public servant his fate lies with the whole electorate. But I would be the last person to call the Oval Office occupant sane.

Here we are in a temporary stay of the longest shutdown in history and I’m willing to bet that after the stinging comments from Fox News we will have another shutdown in mid-February. Millions are affected by this idiocy. The constitution provides for a way to get around an incompetent Oval Office occupant, it is called a veto. The trouble is that the person who controls the Senate is hellbent on the party-over-country mantra. Nothing can be accomplished while he is still in that position of power. The GOP has the immediate ability to fix both of those problems but they presently are just too cowardly to make that happen. Why don’t they see that they are doing more harm to their party by refusing to use the veto override than linking their future on someone (or maybe two someones) who almost guarantee them to go down in flames in the next election?

Yeah, I continue to be an optimist and foresee the day in the coming years where serious changes will happen to bring us back to some decent level of sanity once again. Just don’t make me tell you which of the many possible scenarios that will cause it.