Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Why We Don't Cover the Presidential Campaign

American Digest articulates my aversion to “events” on the campaign trail. Not having a television makes it that much easier to ignore what’s going on.

In any case, we won’t be saying much about the American presidential race until a month or so before the election.

Here are Mr. Vanderleun’s opinions on the current state of affairs:

[Change / Hope / Experience] seem to be the dueling political memes of the moment. Somebody’s winning, somebody’s losing, somebody’s going, somebody’s coming….

[…]

…don’t know about you but to me this whole pile of yabble is just that, yabble. Yabble to fuel the pundits and political junkies. Yabble that keeps underemployed newscasters running around the screen sticking microphones in people’s faces. Drudge and a thousand fellow travelers aside, I don’t think anybody is going anywhere, much less out of the race.

Because none of this, absolutely none of it, is about “change,” or “hope,” or “experience.” This is politics and politics is about one thing and one thing only -- w i n n i n g. It’s about the biggest win you can get. And the prize is using Air Force One as your private plane for four or eight years. Better than hitting the Lotto, that one.

New Hampshire doesn’t, for Hill or Bill or Barack, decide who is the winner. That’s for later, much later. Some lower level flotsam may become jetsam today, but it won’t be the above...
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I also suggest a perusal of his Saturday Drive-By, which is full of things you’ll not find aggregated elsewhere. If for nothing else, see his link to “Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks,” or the list, “100 Items to Disappear First in an Emergency.” The 100 items were compiled by a Sarajevo war survivor.

Somehow stocking up on new google tricks and putting things by for an emergency both seem like practical uses of our time. For the latter, all I have is a case of garbanzo beans, some flashlights, and a wireless radio. Ninety-seven to go…

6 comments:

Steen said...

I´m truly greatful. More than a year !

I had difficulties getting through 3 weeks of danish election campaign recently.........

1389 said...

Our blog does not cover the election either, other than to poke holes in candidates' absurdities and wrongdoing. We will post anything of that nature that comes to light that we deem sufficiently entertaining or enlightening to our readers. No candidate is off limits.

I doubt that there would be any one candidate that our team would be willing to get into bed with, and I would not even ask. Besides, not everyone on the team is American.

I favored Tancredo for awhile, but he dropped out.

I remember a few years back - can't remember which election, but it was a three-way race. The comedian Gallagher asked his audience, "How many of you hate ALL of the candidates?"

The response was overwhelming.

Henrik R Clausen said...

I support the decision not to divert our attention towards that circus. Hardly any of the candidates have said something relevant to our interest anyway...

Dan said...

I couldn’t disagree with you more, there are two elections and the one in November is a rubberstamp of one of the candidates selected now. While certainly boring, as most important things are, it not insignificant.

While I will grant you the clowns running are a sorry lot to my way of thinking it is all the more reason to pay attention- we need the best of them because there isn’t much there to begin with.

Henrik R Clausen said...

Dan, while I had some good laughs watching Fred Thompson promotional stuff, there's just too little to work with in the field at large.

Face it, we are the elite. Yup us. Noone else. Worrysome, ain't it? It's up to us to raise issues and challenge the candidates, if we can. But we can't rely on any of the candidates to actually fix the problems. Expecting our 'great leaders' to solve everything is a fundamental mistake that has caused quite a bit of suffering throughtout history.

What we need, and I've said that quite a few times, is more people taking part in real issues, not just shouting 'Hillary!', 'Obama!', 'Ron Paul!', 'Mussolini!', 'McCain!', 'Huckabee!' or whoever is the person de jour.

BTW, Daniel Pipes has a very interesting article about Liberal Fascism in his newsletter today. That doesn't look good for Hillary.

Kafir_Kelbeh said...

This election cycle will have to change if we are to mentally survive...b/c this is torture!!!

I like Duncan Hunter...he's as conservative as Tancredo, and he made an announcement this week saying he's NOT dropping out, calling the media a bunch of "knuckleheads" for speculating he was! LOL!

I loved that...if he makes it to my state's primary next month, I'm voting for him. All those I've seen online saying they like him, but they're voting for someone else b/c he's not gonna win are stupid!

We need to vote for those in whom we believe...otherwise we end up with the same old dumbbutts in office! (Sorry for the language, but kept it as clean as possible to make my point.)