It is interesting to see incumbent politicians who are running for office touting how much experience they have and why the novice trying to enter the arena isn’t qualified to hold office. It is also interesting, even amusing, to see Barack Obama and the Democrats try to downgrade Sarah Palin for a lack of experience.

She has been a governor for two years. How many years has Obama been the chief executive in any state? What makes him an expert on foreign affairs just because he was educated in Asia? He makes a losing argument, but tells it well.

We have always had great disdain for the negative political ads. Basically, they are saying, “Vote for me. I’m not as rotten as the other guy.” Politics should be on issues, not personalities. But when you have no good issues, the bad politician has to use something to try to win votes. Perhaps someday the voters will catch on and vote for principles instead of politics.

The politicians are really good at casting stones at the opponent or other party, and considering how each one has its share of foul-ups, this is easy pickings for intelligent people to analyze and dismiss.

Both parties are guilty. During the Clinton administration the Republicans won the Congress with their “Contract with America.” They promised lower taxes, smaller government, better education and a better country.

We got lower taxes and higher debt. The government expanded to a size that broke all previous records. The “No child left behind” is a dismal failure. Two years ago, the Democrats took over Congress because they said they could do better.

Since then, gasoline has doubled in price, the housing market is crashing and the stock market is going into a tailspin. The typical political answer to the latter is to stick it to the taxpayer and bail out the banks. In fact, our senior senator, Chuck Schumer, reacted in a typical liberal way. He wants to start a new bureaucracy to solve the problem and prevent it from happening again.

The part of this great problem is that these disasters don’t just happen. They are caused. The most unjust part of the equation is that the CEOs who made tens to hundreds of millions of dollars giving and even encouraging sub-prime loans which caused this crash, will walk away from their jobs still being multi-millionaires and take millions more with the golden parachutes.

Perhaps there should be a crime of “felony incompetence.” The stockholders are being ruined by this debacle and the taxpayers will have to go deeper in debt to pay off the gross incompetence of the management and the politicians who, with all their experience and ability, didn’t see it coming. Or, they didn’t care.

As long as the money was rolling their way, they could afford indifference. What did Obama, Biden and McCain do a few years ago when it was evident that we were approaching this crisis? From what we can see, they did nothing. So much for competence!

They have not even passed a law whereby the incompetents in the businesses that have crashed can be sued and the money recovered be used to help repay the losses. If the stockholders and taxpayers go broke, why shouldn’t the people who caused the disaster also end up broke?

The approval rating for Congress is at the lowest level we can remember. This is justifiable because we could have sent the village idiots and town drunks to Congress and not done worse. It would appear from news articles, that some districts did this.

The only thing that can save our country is a true conservative philosophy of not spending beyond the ability to pay, reducing spending on a grand scale, getting rid of the useless bureaucracies and cutting back to the bone even on the useful ones. We don’t need higher taxes. We need better representatives and executives in government.

We get the government we deserve. This is a very important election. It is vital that ALL Americans vote this year.