Et cetera.

This follows several years of headlines and stories about what a failure former President George W. Bush was. People were shoving each other aside in a bid to be the first to declare Bush the worst president ever, and I’m sure that any day now we’ll start seeing the same calls about Obama.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize the stories exist because they work. If you say something enough times, it becomes true, especially in modern America.

Just ask former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. It easily can be argued the most damaging words of the past presidential election were, “I can see Russia from my house!” It might shock some, but those exact words never came from Palin’s mouth. Whatever her other faults might be, the blame for this can be solely laid at the comedic feet of Tina Fey.

Yet, Palin was slammed with the quote. If she runs for any other office, I guarantee those words will be resurrected from the refuse pile of history to haunt her once more, simply because it’s the nature of modern politics.

As a person who voted for Obama, I’m mostly disappointed with the fact that I had hoped his election might change the tenor of modern political discourse. I hoped that negativity would be relegated to the past, and we’d enter an era in which honest dialogue would become the norm and not the exception.

Sadly, that’s clearly not the case.

It looks as though we can’t progress beyond the mindset that a politician must be continually campaigning lest a weakness be shown. It seems to be the legacy of either former President Bill Clinton or former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich that politics must be a zero-sum game. For me to win, you must lose.

In an effort to eradicate win-win situations, we’re only left with lose-lose.

It’s gotten to the point where I barely can read any political story. All I need to note is who wrote the piece and I already can suss out what the general gist of the piece will be.

All this might be naivety on my part. It’s entirely possible that politics always have been this nasty, and it’s just that I never noticed it before back when I was busy working on being a child.

Even if this is true, the nature of the current 24-hour news cycle has exacerbated the problem. Modern news has shined a bright spotlight on politicians as they tear each other down.

As the recent Balloon Boy nonsense has taught us, the news basically will run anything. It’s become like a small child reaching for whatever is shiny and then refusing to give it up until it’s broken.

So we have endless news cycles of the same news stories, and to fill the endless hours of coverage, we have the same talking heads arguing the same points. It’s a giant game of Mad Libs. Just change the names.

There was a bright moment in the aftermath of Jon Stewart’s famous appearance on “Crossfire” in which it looked like we might return to an age of civility, but that lasted about all of five minutes.

Instead we’re back to Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck tearing down the other side with the occasional break to build up their own side.

Frankly, at this point, the only solution I really can see is if we go back to the days of fistfights on the floor of Congress. Hoping for anything more is a fool’s wish. Real fights will let politicians settle their issues and entertain the rest of us.

Heck, hire Dana White, give it some real promotion, throw it on pay-per-view and it could solve our budget problems.

James Harrison is the State News opinion editor. Reach him at harri310@msu.edu.