Who do you trust?

A word of warning for Democrats and Republicans. When I saw the headline, It's Not About Issues - It's About Earning Trust, I thought, how can you earn trust when the news media are pounding you, accusing you of lying to lead the country into a war in which our national interests aren't really at stake? Then I thought, it's a good thing it isn't about issues, because the Democrats don't have any positions. They're campaigning on how evil Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice all are. It's as though they have a psychological need to convince us and themselves that, as bad as Clinton's behavior was, the Republicans are worse. That doesn't really wash when you ask yourself why Nixon had to resign and Clinton didn't. They may win this round, but if they get back into the majority and go right to work raising taxes, holding inquisitions and leaving our efforts in Iraq unfinished. It won't really matter. I don't think it's the war itself that people are tired of. It's the unending drone of negative news. Most Americans don't even understand that the economy is booming. The late night comics don't joke much about good news.

What worries me is that the end result will be that we don't trust anybody outside of our own cocooned social-religious-political groups. And anybody who brings up the days when we were united as Americans is denounced for questioning others' patriotism which is generally expressed by denouncing America as a blight on mankind. They just love this country too much to allow our irresponsible freedoms escape escape into the world and turn it into another den of uncontrolled prosperity and wasteful consumption.