Where oh where is this third party? Dems/Rep---all the same crap. Old wood!
Right now, a third party is a prescription for national suicide. Look, the one thing that the Tea Party movement has proven without a doubt is that we can get most of the current Republicans do start acting more responsibly if we keep after them constantly, if we get people out in front of Capitol Hill and their offices to speak out publicly about what we want them to do, if we demand that they meet with us regularly at townhall meetings and that they shut up, sit down, and listen to what we have to say, and if we keep up an unremitting stream of communication with them via email, fax, snail-mail, telephone, and in-person. That is a lot of hard work, and it means a lot of sacrifice for a lot of people because it means taking some time off of work, for example, to go to a demonstration or to go to Washington, DC, and it means taking time away from your family to sit down and write out a letter, or a fax, or an email, and send it off to your Congress-monkeys; but that is how the libs/left managed to capture the Democrat Party and that is why the Democrats are currently carrying water for the hard-left even though it means their own political suicide in many instances.
Think about it: how many of the current Republican senators would have gamely tried to get some little gimme of their own into Harry Reid's monstrosity, and would have voted for that bill if it contained just enough vigorish a la what Ben Nelson got, so they could at least maintain that last little fig-leaf of self-worth and tell their constituents "sorry, I couldn't stop the bill, but at least I got us a little something to sweeten the deal"? Lindsey Graham of SC would almost certainly have done something like that. So, too, would Snowe, Collins, and etc, etc, etc. The simple fact of the matter is, however, that they didn't, because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they would be signing their own political death warrants if they did that. And the reason they have that knowledge? Because of all the conservative/Tea Party demonstrations and all of the conservatives who have rallied publicly and told them in no uncertain terms that they would be political dead meat if they went along to get along with the Democrats.
That is how you control your politicians. That is how the liberals and the hard-left have managed to control the Democrats. That is what we have just started doing, and even now we can see positive results.
Basically, we forgot the old adage that politics is not a spectator sport, and got complacent and let our politicians run on auto-pilot. That's not how a democracy works; politicians are very needy people - they need a lot of love and attention, and they will do almost anything if they get that love and attention (as witness the number of Democrats who are currently committing political suicide just for want of the love and attention of the liberals/left to which they've become addicted); however, if a politician's natural constituency does not give it (the politician, that is) the love and attention it needs to thrive, it will become despondent, and will start to drift off in search of others who will give it the love and attention it craves - that is how many RINOs are made: they start off as right of center moderates/mild conservatives, grow despondent when they realize that their conservative/right of center base no longer cares how they're doing, or what they're doing, and they start drifting further and further to the left in search of new "friends" until, like Pinocchio, they get captured by the liberal/leftwing Coachman on the liberals' Pleasure Island (Land of the Toys in the original Pinocchio story), grow long ears and a tail, and begin braying in liberalese.
This is something that we all should have learned this past summer, and up through today, and it is a little astonishing to me that we managed to break so many apparent RINOs of their addiction to the wastrel ways of the liberals' Pleasure Island so quickly that their wasn't a single Republican defection on the cloture vote for Reid's monstrosity - not even a Snowe or a Collins continued to stick with the liberal Coachman (to continue the Pinocchio analogy).
That is something that should be heartening, and something that we need to really stress-test throughout the first part of 2010 and going into the fall campaign season to determine how many of our wayward RINOs can be rehabilitated and which few, like Arlen Specter, cannot and must be put out of our political misery. It would be a true shame to get rid of an erstwhile RINO who has in fact rehabilitated and started to fly right again (pun intended) just because he or she had in the past become a RINO through a lack of love and attention from us.