Looks like I just started a political firestorm.

So tonight I posted on my facebook page that I was not going to vote for the local Republican favorite.

And within a few hours, a number of my Republican friends had contacted me and asked me to change my mind.

Despite the fact that this candidate's advertisements (and you can't listen to the radio for ten minutes without hearing one) are blatant propaganda in the worst ways, demeaning and talking down to his constituency. Why should I vote for a candidate who, by the sort of ads he "approves" thinks that the American people have the IQ of the average carrot? Do they think this person will actually listen to them when he gets elected? His opponent, in what has to be one of the most revolting races I've ever seen, is almost identical. Propaganda from both sides, but just switch a few words around and you'd never know whose ad was whose. I wonder if they used the same agency.

So I get told, once again, with great vigor and vem, that I should hold my nose and elect the lesser of two evils. Yet the lesser evil is still evil, and the two political parties are really one in the same. People keep doing the same thing and hoping for different outcomes. (Isn't that someone's definition of insanity?) They look at microissues, like can I have my guns and my tax breaks and my welfare benefits, without looking at macroissues. Does the candidate really care about the people? Does the candidate know how to think, reason, see consequences before they become headlines? Does the candidate have integrity, respect, know how to listen and weigh truth from falsehood? In this race, the two major candidates have shown themselves failures. Do we sit back and take that? Do we admit defeat by going into the polls and voting for someone we know won't represent us, will in fact scorn us? I just can't do that.

Being in Christian leadership, I tend to play my political cards pretty close. If I share my political opinions, I will, eventually, anger everyone in a given room. I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat, and I am committed to researching candidates and thinking issues through. Most of my conservative friends think I'm as conservative as they are. Most of them would be shocked. I'm probably more conservative than they are, but I sure don't express that in voting the way they do. Most of my liberal friends would be shocked, too. They know I'm more conservative than they are, but sometimes we may vote alike.

I don't listen to angry white men on the radio. You know the type... the liberals and conservatives both have them. The guys that shout, demean the other side, think they know everything, accuse. Howard Stern and Glenn Beck are cut from the same cloth.

Perhaps some will see this as shouting "A pox on both your houses." Perhaps they will be right. But it seems to me that a democratic republic will gain the sort of leaders they deserve. A democratic republic that has poor schools, a low view of research and reading, an appetite for passive entertainment over engaging debate, will most certainly end up being plundered by their elected officials.

I've never supported a candidate who has a snowball's chance of winning, and I don't suppose I ever will. And I remind my friends on both sides that Adolf Hitler was democratically elected.

Just sayin'.