tight spaces

I don't even bother reading the stories any more, but I still see the headlines that tell us "Romney says Obama is blah blah blah," and "Obama says the Republicans will lead us to wahwah sasa fafa."

With so little difference between them, I don't understand how the two factions that make up our one-party system find so much to wrangle about. Consider:

--Since 1960, both parties have led us into wars which, since the beginning of the new century, have become ever more continuous -- the state of perpetual war prophesied by George Orwell.

--Both parties contributed to the de-regulation mania which fueled the housing bubble and derivatives Ponzi scheme that ended in the economic meltdown of 2007 to the present, and both parties have bailed out the insolvent banks with taxpayer money, and done little or nothing to help the armies of unemployed, foreclosed-upon, and newly impoverished.

--Since 2001, a Republican president and a Democratic one have obtained illegal, anti-constitutional legislation from a spineless Congress which violate many of our most fundamental civlil liberties, such as the right to privacy and the right of habeus corpus.

--Both parties are now determined to undermine Social Security and Medicare, putting forth competing plans for doing so which differ only in their details.

I've heard very serious people suggest that these competing cliques of errand boys for the plutocracy represent extreme points on some sort of ideological spectrum, and that our only hope is to achieve some sort of compromise or middle ground, as it were between these "extreme views." But wherever the middle ground between Tweedledee and Tweedledum might be, it is certainly too tight a space to visualize, considering the narrowness of the channel into which voters' strongest emotions are forced to rush furiously this political season, and the obstinacy with which they resist thinking outside the strait jacket, and continue to mistake differences in style with differences in substance.