hat happens in a democracy when truth and facts no longer matter in political discourse. Did America’s founding fathers contemplate this? Did Socrates or Aristotle? In 2010 America we are at this point. The American media gives much attention to people who proclaim to be a part of a tea party movement. People who rile against the government and yet receive government paid for Medicare or VA benefits or unemployment benefits. A tea party movement who as Bill Maher pointed out do not realize their taxes went down as a result of the stimulus bill.

America is in a political crisis but the crisis isn’t the economy or jobs its with truth and virtue in the political process. We have super grid lock. A Democratic party that has solutions and interested in governing and a Republican party that lost the 2008 Presidential election but has not yielded to that result. It is a Republican Senate that has not participated in the governing of the nation. While the Democrats have presented solution after solution from regulating Wall Street to preventing insurance companies from kicking people off once they get sick Republicans have given up on governing and instead only want to campaign. They give speech after speech garnering media attention about debt and government spending. But not one of them will take responsibility for the fact that they created the federal deficit they rally against. They ignore facts. They ignore truth.

The fact is the Republican led tax cuts in 2001 pushed by President Bush and passed by the Republican Congress through reconciliation coupled with their unfunded war in Iraq is the primary reason for the federal budget deficit. Not the stimulus bill which saved millions of jobs and averted another depression. The Republican solution if there is any is the same which created the current economic crisis. No regulation for Wall Street. Tax cuts for wealthy Americans. And somehow magically the budget deficit will disappear. For prosperity and fiscal discipline and a rebirth of the American middle class, taxes for those who make $1 million dollars a year and up must not only return to the levels of the Clinton Administration, but the super rich AIG and Goldman executives must be taxed at pre-Reagan rates. This will lower the federal budget deficit. Increase taxes on those who caused the financial crisis.

The future of America depends on the ability of its citizens to understand fact from fiction. Real economic solutions versus voodoo economics that have been fed to them since 1980. All the while the middle class struggles to pay health insurance, to make ends meet and the gap between rich and poor increases.

Democrats must stand up for the majority of Americans that elected them. If the Republicans in the Senate want to filibuster a Jobs bill for Americans in the face of 10 percent unemployment. Please let them filibuster. If the Republicans want to filibuster a bill that prohibits insurance companies from kicking people off of insurance once they get sick. Please let them. Please let them because it will remind Americans once again who they really represent. And in the midterm elections of 2010 the only bums Americans will throw out will be the last remnants of the Bush Administration.