I may finally be through with voting by 2008. I thought that after nearly seven years of thoughtless, reckless, irresponsible leadership by Republicans, I would be primed and ready to go for Democratic leadership. Unfortunately, the candidates are proving that they just plan on becoming a watered-down version of Republicans.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have hired advisers to help them gain religious voters. Republicans such as on-his-third-wife Rudolph Giuliani and too-sensible-for-mega-churches John McCain are shying away from the whole issue. In essence, evangelical crazies bent on rounding up homosexuals, non-Christians and single mothers and putting them in camps are just going to change sides. This means all of the candidates I vote in in 2008 will eventually see that they get the best votes from said evangelical crazies and will shift their policies to include mandatory prayer in all public schools.

Some evangelical groups Democrats are cozying up to have some reasonable goals – the top three Democratic candidates will appear at a forum next month sponsored by Sojourners, an evangelical group that has started a campaign called “For God’s Sake, Save Darfur,” and called for “a grand alliance between liberals and conservatives that makes overcoming poverty a nonpartisan agenda,” according to the organization’s Web site. While these sound like the sensible sort of people I want to believe make up the too-busy-being-normal majority of Americans, any overtures of peace to the vast evangelical movement means it is only a matter of time before we have Clinton and Obama making speeches at Bob Jones University. The crazies within the evangelical movement are loud and legion, and will force whatever candidate they patronize to do what they say or risk losing millions of thoughtlessly loyal voters.

While they fume about abortion and gay marriage, our politicians are ignoring other issues that are far more pressing, foremost among them are fixing the terrifying divorce rate in this country, rectifying the gap in foreign language education, presenting the nation with health care solutions, readjusting the way we fund schools so that places with the lowest property taxes can get some help from places with the highest …

But I suppose these problems will never be solved. People don’t care about issues that will make our lives better – moral and ethical issues that everybody can agree on. No – people only care about broad, divisive issues that will never be resolved.

The only way to get the majority of America to do anything is to make them believe two things – that not doing it is offensive to God, and that doing it will enrage the people they don’t agree with, since angering the opposing political party is 90 percent of why all people vote the way they do. The only way to make Americans believe these things is with misinformation – the truth has no effect on the dense American skull, so only lies, half-truths or total fiction ever penetrate. The Iraq war proves this, as Bill Moyers’ reporting has lately been showing.

With this in mind, I urge our future Democratic leaders to compile a list of misinformation that will propagate rumors that will balloon into disastrous public policy – and will, ideally, result in positive change.

Convince Americans that homosexuality is caused by global warming, and you’ll have a fluorescent bulb in every socket and a hydrogen engine in every car within 72 hours of announcing it. Bribe some scientist to announce that solving poverty will cause non-white people to become disgusted with American life and emigrate to other nations, and homelessness will evaporate within the span of a month.

Stupidity is the ultimate force in American politics. If we intend to ever get anything done besides natter on about unimportant issues, we need to start wielding it like the flaming sword it is.