This 2014 election issue is simple. Voters are fed up.

The American people aren’t necessarily fed up with government, per se, just fed up with government that doesn’t work.

And fed up with a government that suppresses liberty, restricts speech, is hostile to religious expression, places political calculus above national security and sovereignty. A government that tries to prescribe what we should think, and how we should behave, and trots out twits as spokespersons spouting nonsense.

The U.S. Treasury says in fiscal ‘14 the federal government cashed in record setting tax receipts exceeding $3 trillion, while still running an annual deficit of $500 billion.

What do we have to show for a $3.5 trillion obscenity?

How about $578 billion for a military that can’t defend a U.S. consulate, can’t find and rescue an American held captive by terrorists, can’t bomb or strafe an insurgent enemy in a desert. Instead, U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army 101st Airborne are sent to Liberia to erect tents and build outhouses. And the Pentagon is more devoted assuring women can pass a watered down U.S. Marine Corps physical fitness test than arresting Russian aggression.

There’s $936 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services, with nearly 80,000 employees, which can’t locate a single health care/medical practitioner to lead Ebola containment. Instead the president appoints a political hack whose only encounter with medicine is in the cabinet over his sink.

CDC and NIH spent $37 billion in 2014 -- and in 2009 another $10 billion from the Stimulus package -- on urgent public health crises such as trans fat, bike lanes, lesbian obesity,  origami condoms, anti-bullying, breast feeding,  school lunch nutrition, and more nanny state tripe. Ebola, or more accurately hemorrhagic fever, is not even mentioned in the CDC strategic plan.

The IRS, whose budget is $13 billion with 97,000 employees, can’t collect $1 billion in back taxes from Warren Buffet, but gleefully cracks down on tips for waitresses, and unreported income from hot dog street vendors.

The federal bureaucracy, through its NSA and sibling spy agencies spending a reputed $52 billion, can’t find a few emails from the corrupt IRS operative Lois Lerner.

The Veterans Administration, with $160 billion to spend, is unable to make nor keep appointments for veterans with life-threatening diseases and disabilities and devotes nearly a million hours and over $40 million for over 200 medical professionals to carry out VA union organization business.

The Environmental Protection Agency, spending over $9 billion in 2014, is poised to sue American farmers over creating dust, while declaring milk spills a toxic organic pollutant, ripe for regulation.

And the list goes on… and on… and on. Seemingly every day, another indignity is imposed upon the intellect of the American people. Senator Tom Coburn, once again documenting boondoggles, flushes, and bonfires fueled by taxpayers’ tithes, only revealed a sample this year -- a mere $25 billion -- leading him to exhaustion, burnout, and finally capitulating, retiring to Oklahoma.

How does a heavyweight big muscle government, on steroids, fail to lift, push, or vanquish featherweight adversaries? How can the champ of the free world never land a single punch, instead gets knocked to the canvas by a mere feint -- or more often just the threat of a blow?

Blues legend John Lee Hooker said it best: “ Hey Mr Bartender… I don’t want no vanilla… I want somthin’ strong, fo my money.”

And consequences follow, as Bruce Walker writes in American Thinker, “a federal government that has for the first time in our nation’s history essentially lost the trust of the governed. Washington is the problem, and increasingly, that is the political truth that the American people see”.

Yet intellect, repeatedly pummeled, battered, and bruised, becomes calloused and repressed. Americans out of work, out of hope, and devoid of inspiration -- confined within progressivism’s path to shared deprivation and poverty -- have acquired the hollow look of spiritless anemia. 

Even president Obama’s erstwhile devoted loyalists -- black Americans -- are recoiling against the abuse and betrayal, as “Chicago Activists, Unchained Destroy Black Leadership” bear witness.

A corpulent, slippery leviathan seems hopelessly impossible to subdue -- because under progressive Democrat inertia, government never gets smaller, less expensive, nor more effective. And so we become accustomed to institutional ineptitude by government elites, too big to deliver simple accountability, too insulated to display functional competence, and too self-absorbed, believing themselves bulletproof, to tell the truth.

When hope and trust are squandered, withholding consent is close behind. What comes next? Civil disobedience and nullification.

Instead of something bracing and strong, we get 24 oz tumblers of asthenia stirred with arrogance, entitlement, condescension, indifference, adolescence, incompetence, corruption, betrayal, and lies.

And so this election is a shout out to Mr. Bartender: Hey…get us somthin’ strong… fo’ our money.

At the same time, is the Republican leadership, sitting silently at the end of the bar, really paying attention? Will they deliver something bracing and strong?  Or just another brand of vanilla?