'NUFF SAID~
This is so eloquent in its brevity while painting a perfect picture of the situation. Every member of Congress should have this emblazoned above the inside of their office door.
“Witnessing the Republicans and the Democrats bicker over the U.S. debt is like watching two drunks argue over a bar bill on the Titanic.”

God will take care of it in His timing. Maybe this country will go down but on the other hand maybe God will use something like this to cause people to turn to Him before it is too late. Fortunately most Americans are overweight so we are ready for the famine!

I sympathize, even empathize. However, what struggle against the ravages of sin does not end up exactly the same as what you've described in politics, Bill? Ever despaired while watching a congregation of even redeemed, godly folks trying to get along with, nay, love one another?

Salt work, as is the case of all kingdom work this side of heaven, demands a lot of sweaty, tearful perseverance.

I agree entirely that politics should be way down on the list of Christian's focus and concerns. I also agree entirely with C.S. Lewis about the waste of one's time in following news:

I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then "written up" out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

The beauty of the United States for its first 125 years was that its citizens could largely ignore government, as it was very small and largely irrelevant. I love the scene in John Adams where President Adams and his wife enter a dingy White House uncelebrated and largely ignored. If the government was still this small and powerless, Christians could easily ignore politics and allow the political animals to fight over a small share of US wealth and national power.

However, today with tens of thousands of laws and regulations, and control of roughly 1/3 of the entire US economy, government isn't so easy to ignore. And if the people who want less government largely "check out", it will leave the ones who want more government free to achieve it.

I don't know the solution for people who support smaller government. There probably isn't one. It seems easy and logical for people who support big government to fight for it. It seems much harder for small government advocates to continually fight against it and do the work necessary to stop its growth.