The South is home to the great American masochist. The American masochist isn’t some limp waterfowl that Dick Cheney pays to shoot out of a barrel. It’s the common prideful American that can’t help but to undermine his or her own way of life by supporting the politicians and policies that will inevitably do the most harm.

You can safely assume that I didn’t pull that nugget from any sociology book, but it did come to me while looking at pictures of a gathering of Fred Thompson supporters. It’s unfathomable that anyone is imagining this man being president after enduring seven years of the current administration. Bush’s approval rating is somewhere between squat and lunatic-cult following. And in what way would Thompson be any different than Bush?

Is it because he spent 18 years as a corporate lobbyist, or the fact that he was Richard Nixon’s mole when he was minority council on the Senate Watergate Committee? Maybe what’s so appealing about Fred Thompson is his acting ability. Like Bush, he knows how to strap on a flannel shirt just to show how he relates to us common folk. He hasn’t officially joined the race, hasn’t talked about issues with any real substance, yet he’s leading the Republican primary in many polls. And he’s being supported by many conservative talk-show hosts like Phil Valentine, who has called Thompson the next coming of Ronald Reagan.

It appears these Republican masochists are fully prepared to drag the rest of America into their 7th level of conservative hell.

This masochism doesn’t exclude the Democratic Party either. These are the same people who had John Kerry running against Bush in 2004. I can’t possibly imagine who thought Kerry would be relatable enough to capture the votes of middle-class Americans. Republicans give them all the leverage in the world, and they can’t help but to squander any sense of credibility that they have. Even after taking the house and senate in the last election, they’ve managed to drag their approval rating below Bush’s. And that’s no small feat.

If the Democratic Party can’t win this election, then they might as well buy a horse and move to the mountains. I truly believe that if they can’t show the rest of America how the Republican Party has run our political system into the ground, disintegrated the balance of power and ignored our constitutional rights, then they should dissolve the party. At least that way there would the possibility of a new party springing up, and just maybe that new party would have a bit of backbone. If the Democrats had any they would have impeached both Bush and Cheney by now.

I’m not vain enough to believe I have the solutions for all of America’s problems, but at the same time I’m not dumb enough to ignore the recycled idiocy that we as Americans keep electing to represent our interests. I don’t know if there’s any hope for America’s political future, but I’ll at least take consolation that Winston Churchill once said that you can count on Americans to do the right thing once they’ve exhausted all other possibilities.