Frequent contributor Jim Peters shares his thoughts on national politics:

I have been trying to make sense of Facebook, and I am getting nowhere. It says that I have something like 182 friends, but I do not even know that many people, let alone as friends. One friend I would like to have is someone like Mel Gibson in “The Patriot.” A man who sees life as crystal clear and goes out to do battle without wearing blinders. Maybe it is just the “political correctness” of our current society that is making everyone go crazy. Tea Partiers would not exist if we had not, in my opinion, gone overboard on prescribing the lengths that you can go to in modern society. We can make fun of certain stereotypes, as in the show “Modern Family,” humor is alright. It is just that it has become unfunny to be a regular American. I greatly resent all of those job applications, financial documents, etc. that ask for my gender, my ancestory, and that type of thing. Whose business is it that I am a European-American male? What is important is that I am myself.

That is the thing about the Democratic Party, they do not realize that they pulled the trigger when they shot themselves in the foot. While they grandly advocate abortion, the anti-abortionists show their people pictures of fetuses lining a waste basket, or heads of fetuses with hair and eyelashes in formaldehyde. I may not have spelled that right, but I believe you get my drift. To an anti-abortionist, we are not talking about “what ifs” anymore, we are talking about cold hard facts and some of those facts have faces. An anti would answer the question with the very real option of adoption. There are plenty of people who want to adopt out there, abortion just does not fit into their view of things.

They do not realize they pulled the trigger in this economy either. Somehow, somewhere, it became necessary to stop blaming George Bush and place the blame on the Democrats. It is an unreasonable contradiction, but it is constantly being bolstered by a Democratic Party that hoists the blame on the rich, or the poor, or someone in between, and refuses to take a hard look at themselves. I justified the trillion dollar debt by quoting John Maynard Keynes in his book, “How to Pay for the War.” But what really gave the Tea Party movement muscle was the apparent lack of dread on the part of the Democrats for a multi-trillion dollar debt. The Democrats blamed it on the Republicans, and that should have stuck, but it did not. Instead, it became just plain scary to realize we owed so much money to the Chinese. These are the same people who forced down our best AWACs spy plane and dissected its innards to find out what technology we had that they did not. That was a George Bush mistake, that plane should have been destroyed by our forces before the Chinese even got out to view it. Bush did nothing.

I often write about my brother who was a computer programmer who, like many other lost his job then lost his self-belief because he was not able to keep up with an industry that changes everyday. I thought that the jobs bills should have made room for computer programmers, not just construction workers and teachers. Put a computer programmer to work for the jobs bill rewriting the IRS codes. Make the taxes easier to do. There are probably a million things that a programmer could do for his or her country. But not if we just take care of construction and public sector jobs.

I just saw a commercial that started out with “America is in Trouble.” To paraphrase the Iowan farmer responding to John Kennedy’s question, “What’s the matter with the American fahma today?” asked in 1959 or 1960, the American worker can easily state that he is indeed “stahving.” The American worker today is starving. And why? Partially because we have no more allegiance to the American Dream. Remember that one, when the average person saw him or herself being the President of the United States or very wealthy? We are losing the American dream. We are so interested in being the melting pot that we cover all of the bases and there is little opportunity for the average American to “Go West young man and grow with the nation.”

America is just fine. The average American knows what to do to right this ship. We have to have higher tariffs to make imported items as competitive as they can be with the American items. The American worker may have to take a pay cut. Unions may have to be somewhat ignored, especially when most of those unions seem to be watching out for a less and less targetable agenda. Things can be done, but they have to be done in a unified manner. What happens in Wisconsin has an impact on what happens in Alaska, or Massachusetts for that matter. We have to ask government to tackle problems as a whole. We are too stratified, too sure of ourselves as individual states, and not as a country as a unit.

So, what would I do? First, I would tell the Republicans that they have far better people who could be President that that crew they currently have running. Then I would tell the Democrats to offer real solutions to real problems. Quit blaming George Bush. He has been out of power for years now. The Republican Party is chomping at the bit, waiting for the chance to take over the Congress. That should sufficiently scare the Democrats and make them all sit down and figure out their next move. But let’s make it a good one because we Americans are tired of the political games. And, the political games just go on and on.