If all we focus on is rhetoric then we'll continue to get nice sounding disasters

John Kerry screwed up a speech, this of course warrants hours and hours of debate, discussion and umbrage. Bush screwed up more speeches than can be counted, of course this gets less debate but plenty of discussion. Politicians have sex scandals, this is most important and gets discussed ad nauseum. We expect our politicians to have a facade of perfection - we want them well-spoken, sexually "proper," we want them to look honourable, never mind their actions. Bush has killed nearly 3,000 of our soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in a war of choice. The government's ineptness hundreds of needless deaths and countless suffering in New Orleans. Halliburton routinely steals money from us in its no-bid contract in Iraq. The fundamentalist extremists are systematically imposing their Taliban-like agenda on persons throughout the country. But it doesn't matter if we don't see it right? We have become a nation of tabloid readers, our "news" media focuses on matters previously reserved for publications such as the National Enquirer, and yet we expect competence and action? Only when we stop expecting a facade of perfection, when we stop equating nice speeches with proper governance, when we start to look at the bigger picture instead of salacious afterthoughts will we have a government that we can be proud of, until then we can just expect more incompetence, more disaster, more lives lost, more of our democracy eroded - but don't worry - it will all sound very pretty.