from my political inbox

well i’ve gotten a bit past yesterday’s satirical nihilism. but i have to rant a bit today about high-tech preaching to the converted.

every day, my inbox fills with emails from liberal friends who damn well know that i am voting for kerry. the sending of which is all well-intentioned, i am sure, but the content of which is mostly suspect.

i am told today about the debate over prescott bush’s nazi past. i don’t have time, frankly, to sort out whether this is true or not. i’m far too busy taking care of my corner of the world which, frankly again, if everyone did we’d not have the problems that we currently have. anyway, it’s something to do with bush’s grandfather and war profiteering during world war two. geez louise. at this rate, we’ll be discussing everyone’s views on the war of 1812 in no time.

i’ve also been sent a photo montage with a series of pictures of george w. bush with comparative pictures of chimpanzees making similar faces. thank god our forefathers fought for our freedom of speech, and thank god al gore gave us the internet. what would i do without this in my life? it’s good for a laugh, to be sure, but it’s too guilty a laugh to enjoy very much. i still wish for a little decorum, and if kerry does happen to somehow win this thing, i’m just idealistic enough to hope that he doesn’t get the vince-foster-suicide-whitewater-filegate-lewinsky treatment. fat chance. but i can dream.

i’m sent links to various little film clips a lot too. one of them is titled “seriously”; it’s a woman on a park bench (who, as kirk told me later, is jennifer simard of “i love you, you’re perfect, now change” fame, who he worked with) making various complaints ending with a punch line something like “he’s just so fucking goddamn stupid.” the man may be a lot of things, but he’s not a moron. the fifty million-or-so people who vote for him have their legitimate reasons, and i don’t think that thinking that they are morons gets anyone anywhere.

it’s not like i’m that high-minded (after all, i did pay $10.50 to see “team america” yesterday…), but a lot of time and bandwidth is being wasted on things other than what we should be thinking about.

this site included.

i’ll lump all this together–fahrenheit 911, swift boat ads, everything from the left and the right. someone eventually is going to have to run a take-the-high-road race for the presidency or this country is in big trouble. problem is, whoever ran that race would be defeated.

and, of course, if bush does win, i’ll spend four years essentially calling him and all of his supporters morons. that’s the american way.

or, at least, it is now.

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