OK listen everybody. I know that I have a mixed reputation for being a cheerleader here for Conservatives and Republicans – sometimes I’m a squishy squish. Sometimes I contest the official Party Line. I criticise Sarah Palin, I yell and scream and moan sometimes, or just suck my thumb and don’t write anything, or even worse, sometimes I make jokes. I joke about our politics and I do my best to camouflage whether I’m really in support of a Conservative agenda, specifically. Doing that gives a lot of wiggle room to other squishes and half-hearted Republicans in the room, so they can feel like maybe somehow they’re OK too, but it’s a terrible way to run a Party. I know, it’s the Internet and all…people have all kinds of opinions. However, when our country is really in danger of going into the toilet, it’s time to stop playing games and relying on Transactional Analysis to help us ignore the problems.

There is a certain benefit to having undertaken transactional analysis and read that book at a very young age, but there’s a point where all of us need to understand that the world isn’t subsumed by a self-help book that says everything is basically all right. Because it’s not. And right now, there’s a lot more evidence than ever that at least three things are happening:

1) People are waking up to the fact that the United States has an unsustainable fiscal policy.
2) People in the heartland of America are waking up to the fact that they really need to do something about it.
3) People are coming to realize that sitting on their duffs and waiting to be told who to vote for isn’t going to help save this great country of ours before it turns into something nobody wants.

Right now, as Conservatives, Republicans and Tea Partiers (which I haven’t been until now) most of us understand that unless we effect real change in the upcoming elections, we’re headed down a pretty dismal path of increasing government spending, increasing regulation, increasing fealty to “global government” mandates, increasing lack of responsibility in government for the wasting of our tax dollars, a lower standard of living for our children and grandchildren in the future, a lower set of basic living expectations for all Americans, increased illegal immigration, less control over our own country and its expectations and demands, and even more obtuseness when it comes to the forces of government that increasingly run every aspect of our lives. And no matter how “softly” all of the disparate agencies of the gangrenous federal government believe they’re regulating our lives, everyone who isn’t gangrenous knows that they’re just inflating…inflating.

For the past three years, all of us have been hurt deeply by the economy. It could have been avoided. People shouldn’t have borrowed more than they could pay, and the Government and the institutions we formerly trusted that were private institutions shouldn’t have gone along with the Gubment’s plan. The real problem was that there weren’t any real Conservatives guiding the decisionmaking in those institutions – instead they took that enormous risk and decided to creatively repackage it and sell it all around the world. If there had been any Conservatives there, someone would have yelled: “STOP!” and we would not be where we are today. The past is gone. Let’s not make the future gone as well.

It’s time to elect some different leaders, ladies and gentlemen.

We’re facing a difficult and really hard-fought battle with a little over a month left to go. Everyone is going to have to get involved in whatever way they can, and particularly to get out the vote for the most Conservative candidate they can in their district and locality. They also need to be conscious of the fact that if someone loses the popularity contest, they should bow out gracefully and transfer that support to someone else who is at least closer to their ideals than the other candidates would be.

My personal feeling is that we have a good chance to regain the House with a lot of hard-fought battleground seats and have a slim but unlikely chance of retaking the Senate. I’m a pessimist, and deliberately so, because I know that complacency is no substitute, but too often the substitute, for people showing up on election day.

The optimist in me is going to do a couple of things in the next month, though: I’m going to volunteer as much time as I can to candidates who I think deserve to win. I’m going to contact them and try to help them in whatever way I can. I can’t donate a lot of money right now (because I don’t have much to donate) but I know that I and lots of other people I know want to see the momentum that’s been built in the past six months — from all kinds of disparate sources — is focused and brought to bear this November, and it a matter right now of doing what you can, whenever you can. It’s the Zero Dissipation Coalition, the ZDPC. Fight right up until the last moment on election day, folks. It’s time to push our effort to return the Congress back to actual Americans into afterburner.

And do you know what? Those actual Americans include a lot of nonpartisan independents, many of whom are very intelligent and don’t want to be talked down to, they’re not interested in the sound bites, they’re interested in the effect of decisions on their lives first and then on the country as a whole. They’re a little upset, they want their kids to succeed, they want America to do well, and they’re fiercely independent. So don’t disparage them, because they know as well as you and I do in our hearts that where we’re going is not the best place.

This is the first time I’ve said anything like this in my life and it will probably be the last: I would rather *any* of our candidates win than any of theirs. Let’s do everything we can to make it happen.

Today I had to compose a writing sample because I’m applying for a second job, so that I can help my family survive the still-ongoing economic catastrophe that was visited upon us by feckless people in Government followed by feckless people on Wall Street and elsewhere.

I wondered for a few minutes what I was really expected to write when applying for a job in this economy, as an entrepreneur and a small businessperson who has given everything he owned in the world to an attempt to succeed.

Should it be a lament about how people can be so easily fooled by each other, an acerbic little essay about the power of suggestion? Or should it be something more positive, about looking at a landscape strewn with pictures of broken dreams while trying to arrive at some inspirational moral to the story? I decided to write the second one, and I think everyone here at Redstate should try to, also. We’ve got a long way to go, and it begins in November.