Clete Wetli is a liberal political activist living in Huntsville and a regular contributor to AL.com. Email Clete at decaturclete@gmail.com or visit cletewetli. com.

If Alabama was a person, it's highly likely that it would be involuntarily committed to a mental health hospital for threatening do to harm to itself and others. Of course, that would never really happen because Alabama's been defunding mental healthcare and treatment for years. Instead, it would probably run for office as a Republican.

You've got to hand it the Alabama GOP. They stormed the statehouse to pull off the most epic political hat trick in history as they've managed to humiliate all three branches of state government simultaneously and in record time. If they could figure out a way to run against Obama just one last time, the odds are highly favorable that we'd see them do it again.

Oh, the irony that Bentley was forced to resign on the first day of Passover after he began his governorship proclaiming that non-Christians were not his brothers or sisters. Yet, even after a lackluster first term, Alabama doubled down on mediocrity and gave Bentley sixty-three percent of its votes. You can blame Bentley if you want, you can even use the few bad apples cliche if you must, but Alabama did this to itself.

Alabama did this to itself when it decided to elect politicians who had no other stated position except that they opposed Obama and hated all forms of taxation.

Alabama did this to itself when it decided that focusing on abortions and bathrooms was much more important than doing the hard work of replacing its racist and regressive 1901 constitution.

Alabama did this to itself when Democrats remained sullenly silent as State Democratic Party Chair Nancy Worley showed us extreme new levels of incompetence in messaging, organizing, and candidate recruitment.

Alabama will keep doing this to itself if it allows one-note ideologues like Rep. Mo Brooks to continue to do nothing for our state and our nation except for providing more punch lines to late night talk shows.

Of course, the "love it or leave it" crowd is content with the status quo and ready to express great outrage anytime anyone offers any criticism of Alabama. Well, they're welcome to keep signing up for the circular political firing squad they've created, but some of us really want solutions instead of playing the same old blame game.

It's time for Alabama to take a real and hard look at its issues. The state isn't poor, but the method of raising the revenue our state needs is beyond poor. We tax groceries while we give out millions in corporate incentives. We try to find more ways to incarcerate people while we defund mental health care and substance abuse treatment. We refuse to expand Medicaid while we try to make it legal to carry guns in church.

We spend millions subsidizing the lotteries of other states and vacation in their casinos.

We pretend that legalizing marijuana would turn our state into a depraved hell-scape while other states are using that revenue to improve their infrastructure and education.

Alabama has got to start approaching politics as something more than a college football rivalry where allegiance to team is celebrated like crazed religious zealotry.

Holding leaders accountable will hopefully prevent future stall tactics and fake investigations like the one that, now, Sen. Luther Strange perpetrated. If he had done his job, then we wouldn't have had to sit through a year of embarrassing headlines about our ex-governor's amorous exploits.

Y'all can keep blaming the liberals or Obama or the availability of burner phones, but at some point the state is going to have accept responsibility for electing ideologues and hypocrites.

It hurts, but Alabama did this to itself.