What I Want this Blog To Accomplish

First off, I need to acknowledge a huge mistake on my part.  I meant to call this blog "How to Fix the American Government!" yet somehow left the word government out of the title. It actually took me 24 hours before I discovered my mistake, at which point I head butted my $30 Goodwill computer monitor half a dozen times while bellowing, "for the love of God, why have you forsaken me!" An occasional typo is a part of life, but a typo for the title of a blog?  That's like mispronouncing your fiance's name while taking your wedding vows. That's like coming home from a tattoo parlor to discover that your tattoo artist accidentally wrote "sex machete" instead of "sex machine" right above your groin.That's like commenting on the beautiful contours of a girl's butt from a half mile away, only to discover when you pass her in your car that "she" is actually a sixty year old "he."  Sigh. Yet at this point history has been made.  There is no turning back. My blog has gone public; I've already posted four articles.  I am committed. Just like a man who starts to realize that his evening wasn't as rosy as he thought once his beer goggles begin to wear off, I need to acknowledge the my blog title is not entirely perfect. For all intents and purposes it is a syntactical monstrosity. If Borat ever wrote a blog this would be his title.  I'm not sure when or where or how this happened, but it did, and I am acknowledging my incompetence so that you, my dear reader, can forgive me and together we can move on.

So what do I hope to accomplish with this blog?  Just like 99% of the blowhards that live and breath politics, I am convinced that I am always right and everybody that disagrees with me is always wrong.  And I hope to prove time and time again with elegant prose, meticulous research and well crafted arguments that I am indeed a political genius of epic proportions. Niccolo Machiavelli's seminal work "The Prince" will look like "The Cat in the Hat" once my body of work for this blog is finished. Of course, anybody that knows me, knows that this is not breaking news.  I practically have genius tattooed on my forehead and every time that I open my mouth even God stops what he's doing so that he can listen. (Years ago when I was a football coach, I once screamed at my team that I couldn't understand why we didn't win more football game since I was "almost mensa".  One of my players blinked and asked, "what's a mena?") So aside from convincing you, my dear reader, on a daily basis that I am a genius, what I really want to do is open your eyes to the structural problems that are destroying our government.  I want to convince you, my dear reader, that the American government is broken and that all of the political bickering, fighting and corruption that is going on in Washington is really a result of systemic flaws in our government that need to be fixed, rather than the character flaws of our politicians.  Over the course of this blog I hope to prove that:

• in a democracy that fault is first and foremost with the voters, not the politicians they elect.  Before we point fingers at them, we should point fingers at ourselves
• if we ever want to eliminate the deficit that we must first get rid of the filibuster in the Senate.
• political gerrymandering has practically ruined national and state politics and must be stopped at all costs.
• we will have to either MASSIVELY cut entitlement spending or MASSIVELY increase taxes (or do a STRONG dose of both) within the next ten years if we want to remain a relevant world power with a stable government.
• the American president is not a dictator, and other than in areas of foreign policy he/she is actually much weaker than traditional heads of state, and the second the American voter becomes aware of that fact, the sooner we can start fixing government.
• George H.W. Bush will go down as one of the great presidents of the 20th century and Dwight D. Eisenhower might very well go down as the greatest.

If along the way I occasionally make you chuckle as well, that will be an added bonus. There will be times when I'm sure that I will be producing posts at a fast and furious pace and times that they will come at a slow trickle.  I do, after all, have a job, a wife, twin girls, a geriatric dog, and I train for Ironmans on the side.  Having said that I love to pontificate and I'm sure that the people on Facebook will be glad that I have a new, more appropriate outlet.  So hop on board, fasten your seat belts, and strap down your belongings.  Its going to be quite a ride.