ANYTHING BUT NEW

The way of the Whigs.

If you're not familiar with your history, you might want to read up on them. They discombobulated, disappeared, a once powerful American political party.

Whigs are symbolic for what's disappeared beneath them, too. The concern currently amongst all the turmoil in the Grand Old Party is whether it will pull a self-inflicted Whig and disappear. The replica is old to be sure and it's questionable if it was ever grand. It is also exclusionary.

But any idea that it is alone as if the other party is any less safe from self-destructing is delusional. We've said before and we'll say it again, these are old, tired, boring parties that together for decades have served less than 20% of the population.They've taken us into huge debt, numerous unnecessary wars, created a worthless currency, massive strangling regulations and a tax code that if it were any denser it would be an element on the periodic table.

Both are peopled with bureaucratic leeches that hang around instead of working real jobs to retire on the taxpayers' dime with retirement benefits that equal or in some cases exceed a king's ransom while Wall Street billionaires flap their gums about the Social Security implosion that awaits a few years hence. They voted themselves and their aides a far better, far different and far more inclusive medical plan than other common government workers get.

And they saddled the proletarians with a costly, pitifully inefficient health care plan that anyone with a trace of morality would be ashamed to claim ownership.The only thing bipartisan about these parties and their elected officials is they both patiently steal away their lucre and run when their time comes.

The idea that people are so upset only because of the recession and America's demographic transformation, as historian David Greenberg in his "The Last Great Republican Rupture" in this weekend's Wall Street Journal claims, shows just how out of touch with reality the good academician and so-called political pundits are.

The more you read drivel like this the more one wonders why waste one's breath. These people either don't have a clue or, much more likely, they don't care. And that's the ying and yang of it. Once the majority of the masses fully comprehend that principle, these two bankrupt parties will go the way of spats. The upcoming election might well be the prelude and that's why the entrenched are so pale and wan as the season approaches.

As for the Whigs, it had roots that go back to the American Revolution and though many historians might try to deny it, much of the party's history symbolizes that today's deeply troubled and divided nation, contrary to what media talking heads and others would have one believe, is anything but new. And just for that matter alone it's likewise nothing to be either ashamed of or made to cower over.