Yesterday, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, announced that "private sector jobs are doing just fine" and that the priority should be on government jobs. This is madness. Later that day, Vice President Biden declared that if Congress did not pass the administration's jobs bill - which had already been defeated and was not supported even by members of his own party - the result would be rape and murder. This is madness. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the president can think of nothing to do but campaign for re-election. This is madness. Meanwhile, the Republican Party offers us a field of candidates none of whom can garner the enthusiasm of even a third of Republican voters. This is madness.
There is a crippling lack of leadership in Washington. Our economy is bankrupt, our nation is in decline. Our preeminence in the world is slipping rapidly away, and we are being overtaken by a monolithic communist dictatorship, to which we, even now, are mortgaging our futures. The president, the administration and Congress are devoid of ideas, integrity and honesty. People across the country are suffering; they are anxious, frightened for the future, and growing desperate. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures, and I am proposing one:
Fire them all.
In the 2012 elections, I propose that we unite as a people to defeat every incumbent who runs for re-election. Every one. All of them, from the top down. Throw them out and replace them with new faces and fresh ideas. But not randomly or arbitrarily. Listen carefully to what the candidates say and judge for yourselves whether they are speaking frankly and sincerely about the problems the nation, the states, the cities and counties now face, and the measures that will be necessary to solve them. If you hear the same worn rhetoric, the sycophantic platitudes, the hackneyed political jargon, find someone else to elect. Or run for office yourself. And vote only for candidates who will term-limit themselves, that is, who pledge to serve for only a definite period of time, and then retire.
This extends to the Republican presidential candidates as well. Fire them all, now, and draft someone who will speak honestly to the American people about the crisis we face, and propose real world solutions, no matter how dire and demanding. Someone who can inspire and unite us, instead of scaring and dividing us, as is now being done.
Send a signal that we will stand for this short-sighted, self-serving political nonsense no longer. And send it to the media as well: Expunge the political agendas from your reporting. Give us facts, raw and unbiased, and let us decide for ourselves. Stop cheer-leading for one party or another, or one candidate or another, and dispassionately investigate stories and report what you have discovered. Treat us like intelligent consumers, not wayward children whose minds needs shaping.
We must take control of our nation and our destinies again. We must act as the Union soldiers did at Gettysburg when, after two years of corrupt and incompetent military leadership, and knowing that their cause was on the verge of defeat, ignored their generals and rushed to the center of the line to repulse Pickett's charge. That spontaneous gesture of popular intelligence and outrage, perhaps more than any other, saved the Union. And that is what we must do now, politically.
I think we all understand that the solutions to our current crisis are relatively simple: We must reduce the size and power of the Federal Government, severely cut its spending and curb permanently its ability to grow, adopt a flat and fair tax, impose term limits on all elected officials, break the power of the lobbyists and special interests whatever they may be, freeing government to carry out its Constitutional duties, and pass a balanced budget amendment as quickly as possible.
The politicians will not do these things, and so we must. And it begins with the coming election. Send an unmistakeable message to government and to the world:
Fire them all.
