Verily, dear reader, veterinary verification is not needed to tell me this horse is dead, but I’m going to beat it anyway.

Friday should have been a great day for the Daily, and by proxy for you too, Iowa State. Indeed it may have been, but only time will tell, which is the point of today’s excessive equestrian execution. You see, we lucky few, we expressly opining opinionators who grace the grand and glorious center pages of this publication, doping out daily our thoughts, theories and theses, are always looking for new talent.

The Opinion section right now is a bit of a boy’s club. We’ve got some fantastic women who work with us, as you know, but we men outnumber them pretty badly. Things just sort of accidentally worked out that way, so for a while we’ve had our eyes peeled for another girl to hopefully shake things up a bit and throw a new perspective into this, our biggest little three ring circus west of Iowa City.

And good gracious, on Friday I reckon I done found me a lovely, scholarly lady.

For the Daily that is. I wont tell you who it is yet because, frankly, she’s a bit nervous and intimidated, and she’s not 100 percent sure she wants to put her mind’s private, individual thoughts before the critical eyes of tens of thousands of people. You could chalk this up to the literary equivalent of stage fright, but you’d be wrong. Read on…

I’ve been talking a lot in the past month or two about how dysfunctional and dilapidated our political discourse has become. This is a huge problem, people. We just have to talk to one another in some rational, intelligent way in order to do politics — that is, to interact for a common purpose.

If we can’t engage in this essential sensible and reflective gab fest to identify our common problems and discover their common solutions, the whole system of American government, which is based on you and me working together, just tumbles to the ground in smoldering shambles.

Smoldering shambles, damn it! Are you hearing me?

So like I’ve been saying, we have to proverbially slap our stupid selves silly to shake one another out of this “us versus them,” this “f–k ‘em” funk we’re in, where if you ain’t on my team — Republican or Democrat — you must be a dumb-dumb with nothing good to say, think or do. Raise your hand if you’re one of these people (okay, okay, you can do it in your mind if you want to, but it’d be way more fun if you just raised your hand suddenly wherever you are).

But yeah, that’s what I thought. There’s a lot of you out there.

This goofy, “I hate you; you hate me, we’re one screwed up family” anti-Barney song we sing our political personas to sleep with every night has real consequences. First and foremost, America isn’t the America it could and should be. We all know that, even if we don’t know specifically why and just feel it in our gut. But then there’s the little things that just make you go “hmm” and ponder the sadness of it all.

My new Daily recruit and her reticence in revealing her public self is one of those little things that make me lament the loss of legitimate, socially lucrative public politics. Why is she hesitant to write for these pages? It’s not because she’s shy; hell, you can barely get her to shut up in class, which trust me, is awesome.

No, she’s reluctant to write for the Daily because of you and the way you argue.

She doesn’t mind sharing her opinion, she just doesn’t want some bonehead to attack her character because he disagrees with her position. Call that thin skinned if you like, but she’s absolutely right: A person shouldn’t endure personal abuse at the hands of an ignorant, injudicious and apolitical a–hole for the simple fact that he disagrees with her opinion and isn’t smart enough to debate with facts… Or at the very least, just plain ol’ disagreeing and saying why.

Come on people, seriously. We just got to improve our political engagement. It’s come to the point where all we do is yell at each other, and the people who aren’t inclined to do any yelling of their own just keep quiet and end up tyrannized and marginalized in our society, a voiceless mass of humanity who either can’t or wont get a word in edge-wise because what the hell? It just isn’t worth getting bitched at over, right?

This isn’t how America is supposed to work. You go read the writings of the Founders yourself and you’ll see. They talked about “rational discourse” constantly. “Rational discourse” this, “rational discourse” that, yada yada yada. I figure you’re all smart enough to know what “rational discourse” means and implies, but I will point out that they definitely didn’t say “irrational.”

Without the ability to safely and securely put one’s ideas out there in the public, to be scrutinized, rationally criticized, constructively rejected, reworked and regurgitated into a new, better idea, America just can’t operate — and she’s not. The irrational discourse we practice today is a cancer that’s killing this country.

And to kill the cancer, we have to cut it out.