In 1887, Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Right now the group in power in this country is the Republican Party, and it tends to get a bad rap. But with all due respect to Lord Acton, just because you have power doesn’t automatically mean you are corrupt-just as not having power doesn’t make you immune from corruption.
Some of the people in our government are corrupt, and some of those are Republicans, but let’s not think that somehow Democrats are wholly pure. Corruption occurs on an individual level. Corruption in Congress is not new, and neither party has a corner on morality or ethics.
Jack Abramoff, recently the poster child of corrupting our government, was a lobbyist who gave money to both Republicans and Democrats. There is no reason to believe that only the Republicans are corrupt-it just doesn’t make sense.
We have a big problem in government: Some of our representatives are bought.
But this isn’t new!
We have individuals in Congress right now who have strong morals, like Senator McCain and Senator Feingold, who have worked to restrict campaign finance laws. Others are currently working on tightening the lobbyist reign in Washington.
Individual lawmakers are corrupt, and thus individuals should be held responsible-painting all members of one political party with the same brush is unfair and is a disservice to our political system.
Besides controlling the legislature, Republicans also control the presidency. Yes, a majority of Americans believe that President Bush is not doing a good enough job. His approval ratings are the lowest for any president since Watergate.
Bush’s approval rate is on the rise, however, as our actions in Iraq prove beneficial to the Iraqi people. We went into Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. There are no weapons of mass destruction, but we have still justified our stay there.
The Republican leadership of this country, like most of the international community, believed that Iraq did have those weapons when we went in. No one lied to our country; our intelligence was just wrong.
Let’s not forget that Saddam was a threat to his own people and to us, even if it wasn’t as great a threat as we might have thought. We still did the right thing-he was a man who terrorized his own citizens, the very ones he should have been protecting.
We should now focus on helping the Iraqis. Our country has done amazing things over there-the least of which was the capture of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein. Iraq has held its first true election since Saddam took power, and soldiers are engaged in building schools and paving roads to help the Iraqi infrastructure.
When it comes down to it, Republicans have done good things while in office. The economic recession is ending. We have caught terrorists and imprisoned them, rendering them unable to attack our nation.
Neither party is perfect. The Republicans are just in the spotlight right now, but we need to look at the whole picture-the good and the bad.
It’s hopeful that the whole picture will be shown, and then the true test for Republicans will be Election Day this November. What we should work for isn’t merely a change of majority in the House and Senate, but a move toward electing good, clean politicians-regardless of their political party.