The right and the left -- two sides of the same coin.

I don´t even like talking politics with people anymore, because all they do is spout the party line and parrot the latest soundbites they hear their favorite policians say on TV. There is no more intelligent political discourse it seems. Say one thing a person disagrees with and you´ll be called either a fascist or a commie, depending on their particular political persuasion.

I get reamed by both sides all the time, because I don´t fall into any neat category nor adhere to any specific party. I am very pro-2nd Amendment and anti-big government, but I´m also against the war in Iraq and think that if a person wants to smoke a joint in the privacy of their own home, it´s no one else´s damned business (and, no, I do not smoke pot for the record... and I don´t really fall into the category of libertarian either, because I think we need to protect our borders among other things). In a way, I´m a bit of a uniter, because both republicans and democrats will forge a temporary alliance to gang up on me. LOL.

I refused to vote for either Bush or Kerry in the last election, because I was afraid that I would end up having blood on my hands if I did. I concluded that both of them would continue with the bloody occupation of Iraq that is killing innocent Iraqis and my fellow countrymen. I decided the best thing to do was to "throw my vote away" and vote for a 3rd party candidate. That´s what my conscience told me to do. If your conscience told you otherwise, I respect that. The key is to vote according to your conscience.

Too many people are more loyal to party than principle anymore. That´s why Bush has been able to get away with shredding the Constitution the way he has, because the people most likely to oppose such a thing are conservatives. But since a republican president did it, the republican voters were forced to either abandon their principles or abandon their party. They small-mindedly chose to abandon principle and cheer Bush on even though they would´ve rioted in the streets if Clinton had passed the Patriot Act.

It´s all a joke, and not a funny one. Both the right and the left are selling us down the river and keeping us divided while they do it. People need to get back to acting and believing according to principle. They need to remember the old adage "live and let live". They need to stop being so narrow-minded and quit with their knee-jerk reactions. And, most of all they need to start thinking for themselves again.