Washington was right

For those of you who are students of American history, you may recall that George Washington strongly opposed the formation of political parties. He believed they would become destructive and divisive and thus not serve the best interests of our country. The parties would come to care more about winning elections and personal power than acting in the best interests of the country as a whole. Now his views might be viewed as quaint and old fashion, even naive; however our recent elections have proven more and more that his point should be quite well taken.

What is best for the country takes a decided back seat to what is best for the Democratic or Republican parties respectively. Both of their primary goals is to be in power-- sadly, mostly for power's sake alone. Oh sure they have agendas for the country , but their most important agenda is to be in power, plain and simple.

In this, and so many other things, George was right.

While George and I may agree, unfortunately neither of us had, or have, an alternative-- we have to govern ourselves some way and Athenian democracy would be even worse.

Any suggestions?

I recently heard about the idea of having open primaries where the two candidates who received the most votes( from any party, or no party) would run off in an election for each particular office. It won't fully solve the problem but it could save us from having some of the ridiculous choices we are faced with in this election due to the current primary system, which as we know , are run exclusively by the same two political parties.

Eric