I love to witness the addicted, whether they be in 12-step “Friends of Bill” programs or on the political trail.  It is never their (my) fault…either they(we) have someone to blame or just can’t help them(our)selves.

One day someone, maybe Dick Morris,  may figure out that the addicted are the swing voters.  Millions of Americans are addicted, some like Hillary (and Bill) to lying, some, like Spitzer to sex (with hookers, not his wife), others to  gambling, alcohol and drugs.  And nobody has sought this group, which cuts across all ethnic and economic lines.  Forget black/white, Jewish/Catholic/Born Agains…this is the group to which our candidates, if they would only confess, belong.  For they are all addicted — addicted to lying!

And, so we have bred our political class:  From the Kennedy family to the Bush and Clinton families, we have elevated  those who know best how to lie abut their past, the present and our view of the future.  Perhaps it is what we deserve, but hopefully we can do better.

Our present “Liar-in-Chief” is the junior senator from New York, one Hillary Clinton.  She blithely lies about her achievements, about her own NAME! It would take too much space to list all her lies, but suffice it to say, it is with bemusement that she cannot stop, or admit to her addiction.  She, as the saying goes, needs to admit to her short-comings and make amends.   It is unlikely that we can expect her to seek guidance from a “higher power” — as all she seeks is a higher office.  Her “ends”, which she thinks “justifies her means”, by the way, are way too flatulent.

It is the one truth that she and Bill share, and seems to be the lynchpin of their relationship: They have both always been addicted to assuming power.  Their lies, they believe are dismissable–and they were from the main stream media until another, more likeable liberal, in the name of Barack Hussein Obama, emerged. They’ve cloaked their addiction in populist terms, about how they can bring about a better world, even as theirs is, on a marital basis at least, is a transparent sham; a partnership of lust, not for each other, but of power.  How delightful.  Is that the best we can do?!

And Barack, suave, svelte and soothing, is on a similar hedonistic ”high.”  Only he, raised by a white grandmother, whom he blithely tossed onto the coals of his ambition, he tells voters, can make us whole.  He too is addicted, to the belief that because he fit so effortlessly into our “white world”, that he alone can assuage us of our white guilt and bring us together.  Nevermind that he sat and listened to a hateful preacher for 20 years and never recoiled; he is Superman, cloaked in a mixed-race cape, addicted to his bathroom mirror - and immune to the kryptonite being shot from Hillary’s cannons!

John McCain remains a question: Is he addicted to pain?  He suffered more than almost anyone, and certainly evokes sympathy, if not admiration for doing so; for surviving and starting a new life.  But does he retain a lust, or addiction to the power of our military prowess to invoke the pan-American dream of  planting democracies where, perhaps,  they cannot grow, at least in our children’s lifetimes.

That remains the salient question for American voters: Do we have candidates who lie for the lust of power, lie because they are addicted or because their utopian dreams are what they think we want to hear?

They lie about their votes, their histories; they lie to their spouses and the voters.  One only hopes they lie less to their children.  My own experience is that our children hardly ever listen to us as much as they watch us, and then make judgments.  As it should be!

Or is there a voice, one voice that rings true.  That, in the end, I believe,  is the what the American people will evaluate–and who we will elect to the office of the President of the United States!  Someone who will serve us, rather than themselves.

It’s either that, or they confess to themselves, to a “higher power” — or aggressively seek the votes of those of us who suffer from one addiction or another.  Millions of us suffer from a variety of addictions, me included, and if anyone one of them came “clean” they just might capture the hidden swing-votes of “the addicted.”

Alan Bromley