I wish I could identify myself as a Republican without immediately being thought a pompous, pious idiot ranting about constitutional freedoms and fiscal responsibility.

It’s embarrassing. It’s absolutely embarrassing to be a registered voter in the party of Michele Bachmann. It’s embarrassing that the ISU Student Republicans’ lobbying during Regents Day consisted of holding up pictures of Ronald Reagan on a white horse. It’s embarrassing that the verbal diarrhea Bob Vander Plaats tries to pass off as the expression of family values gets more media coverage than the pragmatism of Gary Johnson. 

And this debt crisis nonsense? Really? So-called fiscal conservatives are cool with tanking world economics over debt their expansion of government forced them to incur? And then, after all that, pointing the finger at Obama?

The people who voted for the Patriot Act are pandering to the quacks in colonial getups babbling nonsensically about personal freedom? Calling our obligation to provide the bulk of U.N. military might “fiscally irresponsible” and “Obama’s War”?

You can’t start two wars, cut taxes for everybody and their mothers, oversee the largest expansion of government in the last 50 years and then point fingers at the guy on the other side of the aisle.

Honestly, these idiots are stopping short of saying “He isn’t fixing our screw-ups fast enough!”

Bad policy and political maneuvering got us into this mess. Throw in the deluge of hyperconservative voters to the polls, and the selfish indifference of people who pontificate about their complete lack of political understanding and you get the current fiasco.

I’m a Republican, and I’m not voting for any of these clowns until they adopt a political platform that isn’t based on conservative ideology and outright lies. 

“But RJ, our glorious leaders wouldn’t lie to us, would they?”

They do it every day. And for the rest of this column, I’m going to be particularly angry about it. 

Reinstating the Bush tax cuts is not equivalent to raising taxes. Cutting taxes doesn’t magically create jobs for the lower and middle classes.

If that works, where are the jobs?

I can see how cutting taxes on certain businesses to remain globally competitive is a good thing. We’re taxing corporations at 35 percent and crying foul when they’re shipping jobs to so-called tax havens. It’s not rocket surgery, and I don’t think I need a shiny economics degree to say that our tax rates should mirror the average for the industrialized world, at least when we’re talking businesses.

But these magical cuts to small-business taxation that the Branstad and the GOP clowns in Congress swear are crucial to creating jobs? I call bullshit. Business owners climbing their way out of the depths of the Great Recession aren’t going to view lower taxes as an opportunity for expansion. That’s an increase in profit margins at best, not a free pass to hire folks out of the unemployment line.

Were they not business ventures in and of themselves, there would be a massive bullseye on the health care and insurance industries. The thing about treating someone’s livelihood as a commodity is that it really is priceless. People will pay anything they can to maintain their quality of life, and the people in the health care industry know this.

So we’re crystal freakin’ clear, I’m not chastising nurses, doctors, CNAs, NPs, or any of the other acronym-bearing professionals in any given hospital. My criticisms are reserved for hospital administrators running their big, shiny death boxes as businesses, padding their pockets until they reach retirement.

I find health insurance absolutely despicable. My dad thinks I’m crazy to have gone without it for the last four years. I see it differently. I shouldn’t be forced to gamble a hefty chunk of my wages on the possibility of my incurring catastrophic medical expenses, especially when the company collecting the checks reserves the right to pick and choose the care I’m given.

Ladies and gentlemen, insuring your well-being is a business venture for Wellpoint shareholders. Your standard of care depends on either your income, or the altruism of those tasked with squeezing as much as possible out of you before you die.

Not that we’re blameless for our health problems. With people needing Big Brother to tell them smoke inhalation isn’t healthy, most Americans leading sedentary lives, and a gallon of milk costing two to three times more than a gallon of pop, I’d say we deserve to be fat. 

We also deserve to be dirt poor, especially as college students. College isn’t designed to be affordable; it’s a business venture as well. 

I don’t care what the signs on CyRide say, when I can’t find a decent place adjacent to or on campus for under $500 per month, I blame bean-counting M.B.A.’s and greedy landowners.

It is not in the interest of the people controlling the wealth in this state to ensure the affordability of our education. Affordable college doesn’t make money. Saddling the majority of students with a debt they’ll be paying interest on for 20 years is far more lucrative, especially considering that most of us intend to get the hell out of Iowa upon graduation. 

Imagine the low-wage jobs that would open up here if they weren’t filled by college students from the greater Story County area trying to avoid taking out student loans or moving into some decrepit off-campus dump run by one of the local slumlords. Nobody works in fast food because they want to. Working minimum-wage jobs to afford college is like shooting a BB gun at a grain bin. You can’t even make a dent.

But thanks to the idiots on Stanton decorating their lawns with cans of Busch Light and the droves of girls out at the bars talking about whose stupid dress covers whose beer gut the best, we all get lumped into that category. 

Complaining about tuition? Why didn’t you get a scholarship? Complaining about rent? Lower your expectations. Inhaling mold builds character! Can’t afford food? Steal more sandwiches from the $9 buffet masquerading as your meal plan!

Yes, you need a college education to escape the ranks of the slave-wagers, but nobody tells you that you’ll still be getting paid by the hour when you have a bachelor’s degree. They don’t tell you, among the glowing statistics of life in Iowa, that 22 percent of workers have college degrees yet only 14 percent of jobs require them. Des Moines is the No. 1 city for young professionals? Sure! If you’re in the insurance or finance industry, or you like playing with corn. Have fun with that philosophy degree. 

We drive cars we can’t afford paid for with loans we can’t afford to go to jobs we got with degrees we can’t afford. We do all this to buy the latest gizmos and doodads we can’t afford. All the while, we stuff our faces with high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats. We work in terrible jobs with shrinking benefits, slowly eating our way to being walking heart attacks, until we hit Social Security age. Then we just sit around draining the entitlement coffers until we either keel over or lie around in a hospital waiting to die. You might as well. After all, you paid the taxes.

U-S-A! U-S-A!

Yes, we could put down the Whoppers, but that would require personal accountability, and, well, we’re all special snowflakes. We’re American. Who needs responsibility for their actions when they have credit cards?

The thing is, you won’t hear this out of the mouths of politicians. Hell, you’ll hear the opposite. When your poor choices prop up entire industries, when your stupidity incites the Gold Rush of the 21st century, when the mere inference of the drastic change needed in the American lifestyle is called everything from liberal fear-mongering to flat-out unpatriotic, you won’t hear a peep about it.

You’re going to keep hearing the talking heads tell you that Obama got us into the recession, that Jose wants your job, that Bruce and Bryce are undermining the sanctity of your marriage, and that, if the bottom 25 percent of your graduating class doesn’t molest you on your way through the airport, the terrorists are winning.

They’ll tell you anything, and everything, but the truth. Why? Because truth and pragmatism don’t win votes.

Hyperbole, hysteria, and profiteering. That’s our politics.