Stop talking, please

My task of filling this space with 500 words has become increasingly difficult, largely because the news consists entirely of stories with headlines such as “Hillary Clinton calls Barack Obama a big fat butthead.” \nWell not quite like that, but you get the idea. \nIt seems to me that politics has devolved into an even dirtier business than usual, as if that were possible. Either that or we’ve had the same politicians for so long that we’re not witnesses to the onset of their senility. \nHow much faith can we really have in those we elect to represent us when congressmen such as Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) tells people that Republicans are sending America’s troops to Iraq “to get their heads blown off for the president’s \namusement.” \nApparently this is only the latest addition to a gem of a track record on Stark’s part. During a verbal dispute in 2003, then-Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colo.) told him to “shut up.” He responded with, “You think you are big enough to make me, you little wimp? Come on. Come over here and make me, I dare you. You little fruitcake.”\nHe’s also referred to then Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) as the “current Republican Conference chairman, whose children were all born out \nof wedlock.”\nThe next instance of political stupidity that caught my attention in recent weeks was Rep. Tom Tancredo’s (R-Colo.) call to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials demanding that they raid Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) news conference to catch illegal immigrants. \nDurbin’s conference was promoting a bill that would give legal status to illegal immigrants who finished high school or served in the military for two years. Tancredo believed three students included in the conference were illegal immigrants, despite the fact that Durbin insisted they were not. \nActing like a self-appointed vigilante border guard by encouraging immigration officials to grab teenagers out of a news conference does absolutely nothing for Tancredo’s credibility. \nPerhaps he should take a moment to contemplate why his support level among the other Republican presidential candidates is only a pathetic 2 percent. Nice. \nThe most malicious political foul-up of recent weeks comes from a less well-known figure. John Tanner, head of the voting branch in the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Tanner said voter ID laws, which could disenfranchise poor citizens without driver’s licenses, might affect elderly voters but not minorities because “they don’t become elderly the way that white people do. They die first.” \nThis appalling statement comes from a man whose job is to ensure civil rights are upheld in the voting process. \nYet all of these disgusting statements I’ve mentioned seem to have made little more than a blip on the public radar.\nIt’s possible that I am more hyper-tuned to politics. But unfortunately it’s far more likely that the American public has ceased to demand any standards of ethics out of those who run the country.