Pic, I hope you stay around to read this.

My family lived the life you speak of. Well my grandparents did any way.

Yep 60 seats changed hands... This is the first election that had unlimited campaign contributions, since the Supreme Court ruled last February. The unreported funds from corporations..some of them foreign corporations had a huge impact.

They didn't give money to the Republicans because they thought they were the best candidates for the country. They did it because they were the best candidates for them...the best money could buy.

This takes our Republic closer to a fascist model. The marriage of corporate interests and political parties. It's not a pretty situation and I do not say it lightly, with any kind of satisfaction or malice.

Much of what people are complaining about with the CFTC, SEC etc. are classic signs of that type of marriage. It is also reinforced by the merry-go-round style of work for the government get a job in the industry you were just regulating and then do it again.

It's just amazing that you think there is an "inate goodness in conservative ideals." No there is not. The definitions of what that means changes over time. Were the conservatives that were trying to keep slavery in America in the 1850's inherently good? or those fighting for segregation in the 1950's or the conservatives in South Africa fighting to keep Apartheid??

Sound government has diminished in the US for lets see... over 200 years.

How about the trail of tears and the supreme court ruling that the relocation of those native peoples was illegal or the Dread Scott decision or Eisenhower's warning of the military industrial complex.

You seem to have been lucky enough to live in the golden age of the US. 1945-1970. But in fact you are the generation that spent what is currently owed. The golden age you hold so dear was bought on the US credit card....and you don't even know it.

Ronald Reagan ran the largest deficits of any President as a percentage of GDP up to that point.

But the US politicians as all of them since the early Greek Senate have taxed less then they spent.

They clipped the coins, they debased the currency...

I hope the two parties try and work things out. The Republicans/ Democrats or Progressives/ Conservatives are not inherently bad...just their track records.