By Rose Pedenko

Sorting the good candidates from the bad is hard work few citizens are willing to undertake. Most prefer to remain blissfully ignorant hoping to remain unscathed while the country falls apart around them. These are the same people that expect you to share your emergency supplies after a natural disaster because they couldn’t be bothered to prepare themselves.

All politicians are alike!

What difference does it make if we vote or not?

Nothing ever changes anyway.

These are the frequently heard responses when you ask friends or acquaintances if they plan to vote. They do not follow politics closely, and sadly, this represents a majority of potential voters. There are those that say “I’m glad everyone doesn’t vote because it keeps stupid voters away from the polls.” That may no longer be a consolation to even the most cynical among us, as we witness both parties paint themselves into a corner that once again has us choosing between the proverbial lesser of two evils, or worse, not choosing at all.

How then do we educate ourselves to make wise leadership choices and exercise our most precious right to vote in a democracy?

We often form opinions from an assortment of unreliable sources: slanted print media, cable news that places more weight on celebrity than fact for ratings, or even well-meaning friends who load our email boxes with disparaging information about candidates. Generally it consists of misinformation, disinformation, innuendo or bad jokes. Even clever socio-political commentary of questionable attribution from Andy Rooney, George Carlin or Jay Leno – gets circulated across the internet from the politically semi-ignorant to the totally ignorant where the rhetoric exponentially takes on a life of its own. This quasi-factual information often denigrates current or former administrations, high profile politicians or their spouses, outspoken celebrities (okay they have a point about them) and now even our ministers.

Speculation and opinion by pundits, bloggers and Drudgenuts alike permeates the media: Will Republicans regain the majority in Congress, will Hillary beat Obama , is McCain too old to even beat up his mother, or will Bill Clinton be Co-President and/or First Philanderer. The list goes on and with each passing day, news clips, sound bites and electronic water cooler conversations (i.e., e-mail) spin like nobody’s business. You end up certain no one knows what they are talking about. Dick Morris can’t even stick to his Hillary will win the nomination theory from one day to the next.

There are two schools of thought on the value of the internet in politics. Thanks to the punishing verisimilitude of YouTube videos and vigilant bloggers, career journalists and well-paid pundits’ feet are now being held to the fire. They need to be right to remain relevant and thus citizens can rely with increasing assurance that, like Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, they will not be ignored. On the other hand, too much information can give even the most ardent political junkies the jitters.

Of course not all candidates will resonate with voters, but this has been a particularly unusual year chock full of no-rhyme-or-reason choices. It was okay to eviscerate Mitt Romney for his faith when he had never previously injected religion into his politics, yet the left praises Barack Obama for his blind loyalty to Trinity Church and his pastor.

One recent glimmer of hope in sorting fair from far-out was the Democratic candidates’ rejection of the far left blogs in favor of Fox News interviews. Whether it was a strategic decision or an act of desperation matters not. I prefer to see it as light at the end of the political tunnel.

In a time when Americans spoke out in record numbers to stop the ill-conceived comprehensive immigration reform bill, we then chose one of its strongest proponents as the presumptive Republican nominee. Many of us conservatives are still reeling from that inconvenient turn of events.

Our President and elected representatives have spent our money like drunken Democrats on leave of their senses and now Senator McCain confirms, much to the vexation of fellow sitting Senators, it was spending, not the war in Iraq, that cost Republicans their control of Congress in 2006 . George Bush abandoned his base and reached out so far across the aisle with amnesty and a prescription drug program he seems completely baffled the Left still hates him. Perhaps Karl Rove forgot to remind him no man is an island. Never abandon your base. Voters, like the elephant that is our party symbol, never forget.

Political mavericks and rogues gambled with Republican principles and lost. We now have a wholly disillusioned citizenry in both parties ready to abandon their core principles just for the sake of change. Democrats will vote as if they live in some ethereal world where the “first black” or the “first woman” president is more important than what each brings to the White House table.

The truth, although not particularly palatable, is that we have the politicians we deserve. We need to care because millions of Americans have died to preserve our freedoms, and those freedoms will ultimately be ensured by an informed and proactive electorate.