Democratic Decisiveness - or Lack Thereof

I have spent the better part of the last 4 months beating up the current executive branch - something that requires about as much talent as teaching mosquitoes to bite. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest have made it so easy not so much because of the policies they set (this administration is hardly the first group to do most of these things), but because the of the total audacity displayed in the policy-making. Violations of basic morality is a staple in political life, but politicians usually try to disguise the violations under a thinly veiled pretense of "doing the right thing". I suppose you could make this argument for the current policies as well, but it is almost impossible for me to do so in good conscience. In my post The Republican Problem, I point out some more of this blatant audacity displayed by the Republican pundits. However, flying just slightly lower on the radar is the shenanigans of a certain Hillary Clinton. Clinton, visiting a southern church on a speaking engagement, broke into a ridiculous, southern drawl during the speech. The video is so pathetically staged that it is difficult to watch. I find myself once again repulsed by the phoniness and pseudo-authenticity from politicians, as in ages past. My irritation only grows after reading things like a recent New York Post article, where Clinton and her aides throw a tantrum after learning that New York governor Spitzer does not intend to categorically endorse Clinton for president. Imagine the audacity of that man - with the '08 elections a mere 20 months away, he is not leaping to the fore-front of the debate with a ringing endorsement of a candidate that he may not even really support? I guess all the rest of the candidates are secondary, and Clinton's Democratic nomination is a foregone conclusion? For shame... With this type of display, Clinton is once again proving what left-leaning scholars have known for a long time, and is so eloquently stated by Gore Vidal: "We have no political parties. We've never had much of them --I mean the Democrats, the Republicans. We have one party --we have the party of essentially corporate America. It has two right wings, one called Democratic, one called Republican." Sometimes we think that the Democrats and the Republicans are fundamentally different from each other, mostly because they keep telling us that they are. Fortunately, we can be sure that the politicians will always debunk that notion with their own deeds. Their political maneuverings spin the entire group into a vortex of lying, cheating, manipulating, and faking... And they tell us that they are different. Is the rhetoric really fooling anybody? I'm having a hard time seeing it.