Forward

Is a viable centrist third party emerging? I sure hope so.

What choices do you make if, like me, you happen to reside in the middle of the political spectrum at a time when the two political parties in this country are dominated by extremists? Up until a few days ago, not much. But the recent emergence of a nascent, centrist third-party offers some hope. Perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel.

It's about damned time.

What do you do when you enter a voting booth, as we did in November 2020, and your choices for President are Joe Biden and Donald Trump? If that wasn't the very definition of an awful choice I don't know what else qualifies. In one corner you had an indolent, shameless, indecent, megalomaniacal shyster with no clue as to how to govern the world's most prosperous free nation. In the other corner you had a fading, lifelong politician who's been a windsock more than a leader his entire career and who came with significant baggage from decades of cozying up to big money and despots to take care of himself and his family.

That's not a choice as much as it is a game of Russian roulette.

I knew that I was going to regret my choice no matter how I voted in 2020 and that's panned out. I thought that I made the least awful choice, but who knows? There's a larger problem here that we really need to address if we want to continue to exist as the world's preeminent democracy.

In this century we've tended to vacillate between extremes in most national elections. This is because both parties have served up highly unpalatable, to many beyond the faithful anyway, candidates. The day's not coming when I'm going to suddenly realize that either Sarah Palin or Kamala Harris made their tickets better. Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are simply not the best that we can do.

Our election swings occur because we are saddled with poor choices who inevitably produce poor results. We narrowly elect one set of nimrods, watch as they screw things up by acting as if they have a mandate to foist their version of utopia on everyone else, then get rid of them as they grow tiresome for the next set of nimrods who do the same thing in the opposite direction. We don't have elections anymore as much as we have political and social repudiations.