A couple of months ago I wrote my fellow blogger, William Smythe, with the advice that if he's going to blog about politics, he needs to find topics and angles that haven't already been so well-covered by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

I shall now be the ultimate hypocrite by composing a post not only consisting exclusively of second-hand thoughts, but direct quotes from others! These are tidbits that sum up the times better than I ever could.

We begin with a pair from one of my new favorite people, Democratic strategist Paul Begala, from his blog on The Huffington Post.

"The Bush-McCain Republicans messed up the country in their first term, and they messed up the world in their second. If they get a third term, even the solar system won't be safe."

Here's Begala again, with a witty thing I heard him say as part of a panel on CNN:

"In the face of demonstrable, provable, incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, McCain and Palin continue to assert that Gov. Palin opposed the infamous 'Bridge to Nowhere.' They do so in their speeches and ads, and their supporters say so on television until their pants are on fire. McCain and Palin also claim the Alaska governor opposes earmarks -- despite the fact that she's gotten her state so much pork she's at risk for trichinosis."

Bill Saporito put things in a nutshell in his piece for TIME magazine called "How We Became the United States of France":

"Admit it, mes amis, the rugged individualism and cutthroat capitalism that made America the land of unlimited opportunity has been shrink-wrapped by half a dozen short sellers in Greenwich, Connecticut, and FedEx'ed to Washington, D.C. to be spoon-fed back to life by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson."

When I write, I agonize over word choice and phrasing, cutting and pasting, checking punctuation until I'm sure I've made my point just right. Then I watch as cobwebs and dust gather on my profundity. In the meantime people who write from the hip, throwing every known rule about capitalization and punctuation out the window as they go, seem to sum up whatever I was trying to say in a nutshell and resonate deeper than my manicured thought ever could. Here are a couple of those guys. First, here's comedian Ron Shock from his blog:

"Hopefully this economic crisis that we are all facing will wake people up to the hypocrisy of the Republican party. They preach 'private sector' and always get a big laugh from their leftover Reagan jokes: 'Government isn't the solution...government is the problem!' Which, of course, is then followed by BIG laughs and HEARTY guffaws as the fat cats all congratulate themselves on their INDEPENDENCE and RISK-TAKING. But when their own stupidity and their own greed and THE FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT TO REGULATE THESE PIRATES (thanks to the Republican party and their never-ending line of bullshit about how 'the markets' know best) leads to their collapse....who do they run to? Why the taxpayers and the government!!! The gall of these people is almost beyond comprehension."

Then here's a guy from the Classic Van Halen chat board known as Unchainedguitars...

"How can you not see that this country is in the toilet?? How can you not realize the lies this administration has told repeatedly, the lives they have sacrificed because they are too stubborn to admit they completely fucked up, the wreck they've made of this economy, the billions upon billions they've wasted on fighting the invisible enemy, at the expense of the things we need desperately at home?...

"How many times does one have to be bent over & sodomized by this current administration, to finally comprehend the obvious?? When does that little light bulb go off in the 'red-stater for life's' brain that warns, 'Uhhh, maybe these guys are not doing a stellar job?'"

That's the USA, September of 2008. Let's put these in a steel box and bury it so in the future we can understand where we drifted off course.