There's no way any reasonable person after doing some fact checking, not recoil in dissapointment, if not disgust by the actions of those mentioned regarding the Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac debacle. And it goes to the root of the problems with politics pre-dating biblical times.

There is no excuse for bad behavior and rewarding that bad behavior as was done in these cases. The balance between free will, free market and the temptations to regulate to suffocation has always been a slippery slope. When one sides rings the bell of free enterprise while ignoring that in America there is no such thing, while accusing the other of unpatriotic motives for trumpeting reasonable oversight and regulation, the disconnect becomes surreal, because both political parties switch positions over the decades as the winds of fortune dictate.

There are no innocents in this particular example of the worst of what American business and government has to offer.  And it has to be an accepted fact that no national political leaders are virgins. We want leaders with enough experience to make good decisions, but we don't want them to have given in to temptation. We want national leaders that inspire us, encourage us and move the country to be greater than our individual self interests. But everytime we think we've found that individual, the election always comes down to choosing the "lesser of two evils."

America is sick of the war and the economic meltdown and we citizens don't look in the mirror. We're the ones who voted the people into office who are supposed to have our best interests not only in heart but first and foremost. We've let ourselves down and those we've chosen to keep the peace and keep the prosperity have failed miserably.

The idea of helping folks into the fraternity of home ownership isn't a bad idea. After all, the government has been subsidising home ownership thorugh the tax mortgage credit for decades. In the days when banks were local, they did behave more like the Bailey Savings and Loan. When the banks became national and international ironically they became too not just greedy but sleazy greedy. They were building their portfolios with loans that were dependent on issues as etherial as "Carbon Credits."

It is without doubt that there are various degrees of unseemly if not seedy behavior by every national elected official. And hopefully, Americans will choose to get more involved with the selection process of the candidates and not depend on Fox, CNN and the National Enquirer to make those decisions.

If anything, this should be a wake up call to this nation to hold those in control of our political process and our economy and hold them accountable by declining to re-elect anyone. It's a shame really, in looking at our national leadership that as Americans, we have decided that this is the very best we can do. And as such, we're getting what we asked for.

One candidate represents a new order more or less and the other represents the past--conventional wisdom says, stay the course, bet on a sure thing. "Conventional wisdom" led some moron potentate at a major record lable to advise Brian Epstein that "guitar bands are on the way out." Had Brian not perservered, The Beatles might have been but a footnote in British music history.

If we don't have faith that there is something different because it is better, not better because it is different for the future of America, then you'd better like what you've had for the past decade, because as it's turning out, ironically, these are the good old days. The good old days that some Americans pine for are days when equal rights for all Americans was a dream of a distant time, when our enemy was another super power and we knew how to hit them as hard as they could hit us the result of which would be world destruction. Talk about global warming.

Thankfully, we avoided all of that. Some of the old barriers have been breached if not broken and the world more or less is a more tolerant place. But still the color of one's skin and life partner preferences become the defining factors of how the good old days Americans see them. We've got a long way to go and hopefully along the way Americans will look at the content of their fellow citizens' character as the final measure of who we are as a nation.