Down To The Wire

Midterm elections are four days away and I'm going to be doing my election-worker thing on Tuesday, so I won't have to hear about voter projections and exit polls and states turning blue and red until late in the evening. From every indication, it's going to be an election like none other, as a tsunami-sized wave of stupidity and ignorance threatens to wash over this nation coast to coast as a plague of locusts, I mean Tea Partiers, comes home to roost.

Like an enormous flock of really stupid buzzards, the Tea Party candidates are circling in the sky right now, just waiting to swoop down on the decomposing remains of the dignity of this country. This has been an amazing election for a number of reasons, one of the worst being the enormous amount of money that has been poured into it over the last couple of weeks. They said on TV that more money has been spent on political advertising in the past two weeks as has been spent in the previous nine months. All thanks to those monolithic dipshits on the Supreme Court, who last January opened the floodgates by ruling that corporate interests can express their political opinions just like a regular flesh-and-blood person. And they "express" themselves with their deep pockets and funnel their money through a myriad of political action organizations with innocuous-sounding names.

Stretching the First Amendment until it's nearly unrecognizable, the "Justices" (term used loosely) did exactly the very worst thing it could. The election process in this country was already corrupted and debased by enormous amounts of money, and the Court ruling only allowed more money to be injected into a very sick, very broken system. It's like trying to put out a raging fire by pouring a bucket of gasoline on it. Now, right-wing crackpot groups in New York or Florida can buy airtime and drop their noxious opinions on Congressional races in Arizona and California. How is it even possible that single-issue social-conservative groups on the other side of the country know what is best for people in Arizona? In fact, they don't know what is best for us, nor do they care. The only thing they care about is to get the candidate they favor into office, who will presumably do their bidding and advance their twisted agenda. You might think it's the responsibility of the voter to weed through this weird blizzard of attack ads and ferret out the truth, but very few people care enough to do that.

The current crop of candidates include some of the most backward, reactionary and just plain deadheaded dimwits that I can ever recall. It seems the more idiotic, ridiculous and simple-minded the candidate, the more popular they are. Sharron Angle, running for Senate from Nevada, is a bottomless pit of stupidity, saying some of the most outrageous and jaw-dropping nonsense ever heard, and still she is in the race. In any other election, someone who had said such completely ridiculous things would have been laughed off the ticket, but not this time. There is another trend among these candidates to only talk to who they want to talk to, which is usually the cesspools over at Fox News, because they know they will be handled with kid gloves, portrayed in an extremely favorable light, and not asked any hard, embarrassing questions. Just the other day some journalists tried to corner Sharron Angle to have her answer some questions and she took off running on her stubby little tree-trunk legs like she was being chased by a murderer with a chain saw.

We see that here in the state of Arizona as the poorly-embalmed, grossly incompetent Jan Brewer refused to have any more debates with other gubernatorial candidates because the first debate made her look like a complete, total idiot. Which she surely is. But her habit of just not talking to anyone asking legitimate questions and trying to get some information out of her for the benefit of the voters is bad enough, but the fact that the voters let her get away with it is the most disturbing aspect of all. How very sad for the future of this country that the voters are so ignorant and disengaged that they just don't care anymore when candidates basically spit in their faces and say, "eat crap, I'm not telling you anything because I don't have to."

We haven't heard much from the Delaware Dimwit, Christine O'Donnell, because she's thankfully sinking fast in the polls and will hopefully just be a weird footnote when this is all over. Even the eternally annoying Sarah Palin hasn't opened up her big mouth in support of the Anti-Masturbation Princess in weeks. But there is a big surplus of creeps, like Joe Miller in Alaska and Ken Buck in Colorado and Nazi cross-dresser Rick Iott in Ohio and the F-5 tornado of weirdness Rand Paul and going-to-pop-an-artery-any-second Carl Paladino, candidate of governor of New York, to name a very few, who are more than ready and willing to drag down this country in a maelstrom of idiocy and backward, regressive thinking.

Who is to blame for this very sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves? There is plenty of blame to go around, first to the Democrats who have an astounding talent to pull defeat from the jaws of victory and absolutely screw up everything they touch. They have shown a startling lack of backbone in everything they do, and are so afraid offending anyone they end up offending everyone. President Obama gets some blame, too, for being too decent and intelligent a person, and making the great tactical error of thinking he could get the Republicans to cooperate and come together with the Democrats to try to solve some of the enormous problems that face this country. A huge segment of the Republican Party has never ever accepted a black President and barely bother to conceal their racism and bigotry anymore. A lot of them think the President is a Muslim. How can we possibly combat ignorance and stupidity of this magnitude?

But in my opinion most of the blame has to go to the American public, who somehow think the way to solve the problems of this nation are to elect the most ignorant, unqualified and stupid people that can be found. Somehow they have come to the conclusion that dumber is better, and the best thing to do is to take everyone back to the 1950s, when everyone knew their role and their place and everything was better. Back then, there was no Al Qaeda, no bin Laden, no September 11th, no AIDS, no nuclear proliferation, no global warming (although a lot of people think that is a farce), no economic collapse, no multi-billion dollar bailouts. It shows ever so clearly the intellectual cowardice of the American population, and how they prefer to do the ostrich-head-in-the-sand approach to fixing everything. I dread next Tuesday, but at the same time I wish it was already over. If it looks really ugly now, that's probably nothing compared to what it will look like on Wednesday morning.