Agreed.  But there is a certain amount of blame required in these matters.  If something works someone should get credit and if something fails someone should get the blame.  Without the appropriate credit for deeds given to the responsible party we would end up making the same mistakes over and over again....which is where we are right now.  Hardly any of the credit/blame winds up where it rightfully should and as a result we keep making the same mistakes over and over.

One such mistake is constantly electing from among 2 (at most 3) candidates for president all of which are put up as candidates by those who already have power.  Recently folks mocked Iran because the Guardian Council selects who can run (ie Mousavi and Ahmadinejad) and Iran is stuck with two fairly bad  choices but this is exactly what we have...the ruling power groups decide who we get to elect in essentially all of our races...the combination of the RNC and DNC is our Guardian Council....and we wonder why we keep getting the same trash in office and only rarely see someone who is both competent and actually gives a crap. 

Ok I'm a huge proponent of drilling in the US...but "drill in the US" is not an answer to our problems all by itself.  The issues and the problems are far more complex than that. 

It took a year and a half, but finally your starting to see things like me :).

This is the advantage of being 40. It took you until 23, and the next 17 years of your life will do nothing but enforce this feeing, until one day your arguing with 23 years olds about how it's not this party or that, but it's the system.

Welcome to the small government argument :)

Well, I'm talking specifically about today's politics. I have no problem with pointing my finger at people who ran up our national debt a ton (Reagan, the Bush duo), nor do I see an issue in criticizing a guy who handed our economy over to foreign nations (Nixon). So yes, from what I have observed, most of the fuck ups that have led to our current predicament were caused by Republicans. Recessions have happened dozens of times in our history, I'm not complaining about that. It's thing that were set in stone decades ago. Complain about FDR as you will, but he didn't doom us all.

Rant over. I blame the roots of our problems on the Republicans (hence why I'm a liberal registed Independent), but none of the parties have it right today. Not even the Libertarians.

France being 3 in that list really invalidates it in my mind...

I mean France is one of the most messed up, racist/sexist countries in the 1st world.

Funny thing about Nixon.

He'd be considered a liberal now a days.

If it was up to Nixon we'd already have a universal healthcare plan actually.

His healthcare plan actuallty might look familiar... it involved adding a government run insurance plan that anyone in the US could buy.

He went one step further though and mandated that employers must provide health insurance as well... so they wouldn't just drop their plans and force everyone on the public plan.

You mean germany invalidates it. They are so afraid of their nations' scars that they limit their freedom.

And Sweden.............. sweden.........................

Republicans absolutely have plenty of blame here but you're selling the Dems well short of their responsibility.

Also I will say that while everyone loves to harp on Reagan's deficits they usually don't like to factor in that the cost of fighting the cold war was around $800 Billion (adj).  Nobody harps on FDR for WWII defecits...so why Reagan?  Another part of that is having lowered the income tax rate from 70% to eventually 28% (among other tax changes) which lead directly to economic boom after some very tough times prior to his election.  He may have spent a bit more than was necessary from the strictest fiscal conservative view, but he did a fantastic job in getting the economy going and ending the cold war among several other major accomplishments - all of which are reasons for those deficits that other presidents would easily get a pass on.

As for the Bushs..yeah they were far from fiscal conservatives and there isn't much worth saying in their defense...

The issue right now for Obama is there is nothing tangible from his deficit and his deficit is frighteningly large (magnitudes beyond any prior president in the same time period) and he plans to spend prepostrously large amounts of money beyond that...so yeah people are going to be critical until they start to see some major results for those massive piles of dollar bills going out the door.

Any high school government class in the country will tell you that lowering taxes and increasing spending is a great way to stimulate the economy, but it's also not substainable. And here's the thing about Cold War costs: They were only as much as the guy in charge wanted them to be. The previous presidents during the Cold War didn't rack up huge amounts of debt just because of the war, and that's been true for several wars in our past. We weren't even doing that much fighting. Are you really comparing Cold War costs to World War II costs? You know how silly that comparison is, right? And here's the thing: FDR might have created some debts or some deficit, but the numbers didn't put us in dangerous territory. Reagan's ridiculous lack of money sense started a trend so big that we're running out of numbers to count our national debt on (thank god we're so resourceful!). Reagan brought the economy up through an unsustainable model, and the country suffered for it. Reagan's strategy was great assuming that the other nations didn't expect us to pay them back. The Reagan administration defintely played a big part in ending the Cold War, but there were a lot of other forces at work responsible for the USSR's downfall.

Obama is just another idiot continuing the last 3 decades of our destruction.