[crusso]

Of that entire group you just mentioned, the most divisive class warfare big government statist was Obama.

At least if McCain had been elected then we would have had opposition party contention between the executive and legislative branches.

At least with a Republican in office, the media would have been more likely to do its job by asking tougher questions and analyzing rather than fawning and adulating.

Before all that, though, maybe people should get involved earlier in the process and not let the media, the party leaders, and Saturday Night Live pick their candidates for them?

[zzzeek]

right, because when we had republicans like Bush/Cheney in office, everything went far better than they are now. Feel free to be a Republican just as I feel free to be a Democrat, but that's not really relevant to this issue. The majority of Obama's support on these issues comes from Republicans.

[crusso]

Since I never voted for any Bush, your straw man does not apply. I'm not advocating being a Republican. I'm advocating being independent and making strategic decisions about candidates based upon core principles - rather than being a jersey-wearing die-hard fan of a political party.

That said, I do think that having a Republican administration take the blame for the current scandals (IRS, NSA, AP, Benghazi) would have been a good thing.

If we extrapolate the level of anal probing that went on as a result of the Valerie Plame outing to the above scandals, the media wouldn't let any of them go until something more meaningful happened in congress, in the courts, or in voting booths.

As it is, these scandals are all disappearing from the MSM's coverage. Maybe they can do another multi-month coverage of George Zimmerman-like trials to take our minds off of important things.

[zzzeek]

I'm not a "fan" of the democrats, as I said, if we had a viable multi-party system I'd much more often be voting green, with democrats as my second choice, so that a losing green vote isn't a winning republican vote. But as it stands, there is no way to vote for a "first and second choice".

Also, as we went to war in Iraq because the MSM, including the new york times, as well as congress, went along with the republicans, so you can't generalize that a certain combination of R/D leads to the most checks and balances via the government or the media. The democrats in congress rubber stamped a whole set of republican policies - the democrats are a terrible opposition party since they offer so little of it. Checks and balances are essentially working terribly (we currently have 100% obstruction for almost all issues, then for this one we have too little) and no R/D pattern will fix that, only changes to the rules including voting (compulsory, allow second choices) and campaign finance (there should be almost no finance in campaigns) will change that.

[cdash]

Not really, there is a small minority of democrats and a small minority of republicans that don't support him on these issues and all the rest do on both sides.