It irritates me when I encounter someone bashing Republicans/conservatives or Democrats/liberals to the exclusion of the other. It reveals that person’s ignorance and their hypocrisy.

So imagine my exasperation when I opened up the Iowa State Daily on Tuesday and see not one, not two, but three opinion pieces out of five in the center spread (six if you include the editorial, and I counted only four non-sports news articles written by Daily staff in the whole paper!) all griping, at least in parts, about essentially the same thing: Republicans and their corporate influence on and entanglement with American government.

Liberals seem to have had a drink of the same Kool-Aid in that they all appear to think that Republicans are the big, bad wolf when it comes to corporatism in government. So let’s do some fact- and sanity-checking that some of the writers in Tuesday’s Daily didn’t:

President Barack Obama’s major campaign contributors include the PACs and owners/members of Goldman-Sachs, Microsoft, Google, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Time Warner, IBM, Morgan Stanley, General Electric and a handful of giant law firms with names too long to type.

Vice President Joe Biden got paid by folks from Bank of America, Citigroup, Comcast and even more law and finance firms than Obama did, such as Weitz and Luxembourg, Cooney and Conway, Broadway Partners, Weil, Gotshal and Manges, and many more.

Secretary Hillary Clinton not surprisingly received money from most of the same contributors as Obama, though we also should add the notable Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Price Waterhouse, Ernst and Young, News Corp and Cablevision.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s major campaign contributors include a ton of labor unions (which are corporations, mind you), a bunch of law firms too, and even more banks and investment groups. One example of the latter is Farallon Capital Management, which in its ironic and “Republican-esque” self-description claims it “manages equity capital for institutions and high net worth individuals.” Fun fact: Did you know Nancy Pelosi is one of the wealthiest representatives in Congress? About half the richest congressmen are Democrats, not Republicans, actually.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid’s long contributor list includes folks from: MGM, AT&T, Comcast, some of the same names aforementioned like Weitz and Luxembourg and, much to my great amusement, a whole bunch of big casino corporations.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin was funded by the PACs and owners/members of Motorola, Northern Trust, Kirkland and Ellis, Citigroup, Simmons Cooper, the Renco Group, AMR Corp and a gaggle of other law and finance firms, just like all the others.

You’ve probably heard of many of these corporations because they were recipients of TARP “bail-out” funds. That’s right: People from these corporations gave money to the very representatives who gave them bail-out money — your tax dollars — so those rich CEOs could keep their jobs and stay rich. How’s that for corporate influence in American politics? So let’s cut the crap about the supposedly rich and greedy Republican corporate elitists screwing up our government, mmkay?

What America needs isn’t more Democrats or more Republicans; neither side is the solution (you’d think we’d have figured this out by now). What we need is a mass realization that neither ideology represents anyone but themselves, collectively, for the very reason that they are ideologies. Ideology is mob politics, destroying the possibilities for individual thought and genuine political action, and being asked to pick between Republicans and Democrats is like being asked to pick up the clean end of a turd. Both sides seem hell-bent on screwing us, with the only difference being that one might screw us faster. Either way the end result is the same: We’re screwed.

What America needs is Americans talking to and working with each other out in the world, not sitting at home watching MSNBC or Fox News and getting riled up about stuff they probably don’t understand anyway, because all they know about it is what they heard on MSNBC or Fox News in the first place. Near as I can tell, with respect to average Americans, the whole battle between Democrats and Republicans is media-fabricated anyway, or at least sustained and inflamed by the media. I bet most of you have friends from the “other side” too, and your relationships probably don’t suffer much, if at all, due to your chosen party. Heck, some of the Daily writers this complaint is partially aimed at I can call friends.

In my observation, unless one is truly a far left or right-wing radical, most Americans seem to get along perfectly well despite our pre-constructed and imposed ideological differences. Perhaps we tend to get along in the “real world” because we humans, when interacting with one another as individuals rather than as “Republicans” or “Democrats,” have an instinct that tells us our ideologies are personal, and we don’t make our private beliefs public. Because of this, our interactions — our true politics — aren’t cluttered with nonsense, making us more free to seek and address our common needs.

The ideological identification and resulting alienation from one another clearly is not working, and our private lives, our society and our government are all suffering for it. The only distinction we ought to make about ourselves is that we are Americans. There is no “other side,” as we’re all in this world jointly. It’s time we started acting like it by acting together. It’s easy after all: Just get together with some people and simply talk. The common needs and interests — the politics — will arise naturally, as if by magic, and you might even miss it if you’re not paying attention.