...but even Rip Van Winkle doesn't sleep that long.
I've probably said this somewhere before, but I'm not following the US primaries very closely. It's for a few reasons... one, it's not my country, and in the abstract, I don't care that much. Two, to me, it largely looks like just more of the same. Bush wants to nuke Iran. Cheney wants to nuke Iran. McCain sings about nuking Iran. Hillary just said she'd nuke Iran. What's the difference which of these inhuman talking heads actually fronts the global hegemon-factory when the product is always the same? Three, they drag this shit out for so colossally long every four years that's it pretty much boring before it's even really under way. Jesus, it doesn't take this long to elect a pope, and he gets the job of God's (ostensible) representative on Earth, for life. Come on, folks. Pick a town, hold a fucking convention, and get it over with in six weeks, not eighteen months.
Anyway, I notice that whenever I think the news is good, it's bad, and vice versa. Obama won a state last night, lost a state last night, but apparently it's such good news he's taking the day off. From what I read, even if he wins every single remaining delegate, he still can't win without the "superdelegates". Oh, that's democracy, alright. A year and a half of giving the same speech, mud-slinging, disavowing old friends, billions spent on basically nothing... and it comes down to the hands of a few dozen tenured plutocrats anyway. Why the fuck are they letting it drag on? Why don't they get it over with so the Democrats can cobble together some kind of united front before the election rather than bombing their own bridges and saving the Republicans the effort? Why, if they must have these 50 needless primaries, don't they have them all at the same time so I don't hear stuff like "ordinarily, the people of North Carolina's votes don't count for much because the candidacy has already been decided by the time of their primaries..." Who the fuck considers THAT a shot in the arm for democracy?
And let's not forget, all this pointless, mind-numbing, wasteful lunacy is just the lead-up to an election that, itself, is not decided by a nation of equal men and women each casting an identical vote for the one office in their nation they all share, but by that gigantic Cuisinart of democracy called the Electoral College in which the vote of a Wyomingite carries four times the weight of that of a Californian (and that's taking population into account, too)... unless, of course, the Wyomingite votes for the losing party in his state, in which case his vote counts for... nothing.
Hard to get really excited about a contest with this many handicaps.
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2 comments:
It's annoying as hell, and less than empowering. One look at this spectacle, and it's clear why so many spending their nights glued to this thing called reality TV.
And that's without mentioning that they don't actually count the votes!
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