BUT, I absolutely hate the polarization of our political system. I gave up watching the Daily Show and the Colbert Report a few years ago for Lent and didn't go back for 6 months. It was nice not feeling like "the other side" was stupid at least for a little while.
I recently read a book about borderline personality disorder called I Hate You, Don't Leave Me. Great book. But one of the most important "eye-openers" in the book was about our borderline culture. Everything is black and white, right and wrong, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat. There is no room for disagreement. There is no room for gray areas. There is no room for "we just don't see eye-to-eye on this one." Either you're on my side or you're pure evil. Either Barack Obama is Hitler, or he's the Messiah. Either Romney will "unchain" Wall Street and re-enslave all African-Americans in this country (or whatever Vice-President Biden meant by that quip), or he'll give us all golden parachutes (well, except the moochers).
Let me suggest that it isn't nearly that simple. Let me suggest that both Obama and Romney are a complicated mix of self-interest, political pandering, and honest-to-goodness "I think this is the way it out to be." Maybe I'm naive (it's happened before), but I'm just sure that they each think they're trying to take the country in the right direction, AND they are trying to placate their political bases, AND they are trying to be elected (or re-elected) to the most powerful job in the world.
So with that in mind, let me also suggest Magic Hat's variety 12-pack, which is designed, we are told, "to provoke political discussion." After all, Obama's beer summit with Biden, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and police Sgt. James Crowley was political genius. Did it solve race relations in America? No. Did it end racial profiling as we know it? No. But it got a couple of guys--who had done and said some over-the-top stuff in the heat of the moment--to sit down, have a beer and talk it out. Now isn't that much better? Instead of sticking a mic in their faces and letting them go after each other in public, he got them to sit down and do some real work, some real soul-searching. What if Boehner and Obama did that to hash out the debt-ceiling debate? What if the President, Paul Ryan, and members of the Congressional Budget Office sat down over a beer before they went on Fox News or the Daily Show? What if they all just chilled the hell out, cracked jokes about their mothers-in-law, got to know each other as friends, and then tried to work together? I believe beer can make that happen. 
God bless America. God bless beer.
