I really don’t know what is more discouraging: that the Evil Racist Morons are going to win big tomorrow, or that the only alternative to them is a bunch of spineless incompetents who are only marginally less evil.
I have to tell you that I am seriously contemplating not voting tomorrow. My sitting Congressman, John Tierney, whose wife was just convicted of tax fraud, has a comfortable 2-1 lead over the Birther nutbag who is his Republican opponent. I have expressed my opposition to Tierney in the past for his support of things like TARP and the PATRIOT Act. I don’t want to vote for him, he doesn’t need my vote to win, there’s no opposition except a Koch-Sucker, and so that’s one wasted vote if I cast it.
The governor’s race in Massachusetts has been laughably bad. The incumbent Democratic governor is a complete joke. He got off to a piss-poor start by drawing attention to himself for spending a ton of money to redecorate his office after his inauguration, then he got caught making calls in behalf of his former employer, a corrupt mortgage firm. Otherwise, he’s done next to nothing except look like a deer in the headlights with each passing month’s unemployment and budget cut news. The Republican doesn’t seem to be a Koch-Sucker, per se, but he is one of those Republican guys who is a little too cozy sliding back and forth between the public sector (he’s the guy who oversaw the finances on the Big Dig) and the private sector (his last gig was running a major health insurance firm), and seems to excel at lining his own pockets and little else. Even the independent is nothing but a Democratic machine guy who has little to offer and absolutely no chance of picking up any more than 10% of the vote. The Green Party candidate is a woman who is more or less the Harold Stassen of Massachusetts politics and has just about as much likelihood of getting elected. Again, a completely wasted vote, no matter who gets it.
My state rep is a career Democrat who has been in the State House far too long but is too conservative for me to even consider voting for. He’s running against a guy who is on the local school board, who may or may not be a Koch-Sucker, but I ain’t willing to find out.
And I suspect that these scenarios are truer to what is happening across America than the high-profile races that get all the attention in the media: really lame Democratic candidates versus a crop of potentially volatile nutjob Republicans (or else the usual slimeball Republicans), and the really small group of fired-up nutjob Tea Party people can propel their candidates, because there are too many races where NOBODY is a good choice.
The problem is in the aggregate: nobody minds spending a penny on something, but if a few million people all give you a penny, pretty soon you’ve got a lot of money. The entire business model of the Internet is predicated on this very idea, and it works. So the American public is like all those people who bought iFart apps for their iPhones, paid 99 cents for a five-minute chuckle, and turned a bunch of lame-ass “developers” into instant millionaires for SELLING FART NOISES. Next thing you know, every dipshit who can learn how to fart into a microphone and digitize it is trying to cash in, and one of the most revolutionary technology products of the last decade is reduced to being a very expensive whoopie cushion. And that is exactly the state of American politics: offensive-gas-producing lamebrains cashing in on a public too distracted to notice or care that they’re trashing the place.
At least after you’ve gotten your fill of iFarting you can remove the app from your iPhone and pretend it was never there, but all these Koch-Suckers are going to be in place for a minimum of two years, and some of them are here to stay for a long, long, LOOOOOOOONG time. The problem with choosing the Evil Racist Moron Party is that they are already committed to making things worse for the foreseeable future. The problem with choosing the Spineless Incompetent Party is that they can’t do anything at all, for better or for worse. So, while you really wanted your iPhone to do all those cool things like on the TV commercials, you’re stuck with an uninstallable iFart app that forces you to upgrade to iFart 2.0 whether you want to or not, and the new version has found a way to digitize SMELL. But unless you jailbreak your iPhone, you can never get anything better, because Apple is so deeply invested in the status quo.
What worries me is that even though Election Day is Tuesday, on Wednesday the campaign for the 2012 elections will begin promptly at 7:00 a.m. with the morning shows, and the Democrats are going to have learned from the Republicans that you can scrape the bottom of a really deep barrel and still find candidates most Americans will vote for. And that’s exactly what we’re going to get.
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