Mindless Wednesday rambling

Being moderately discouraged has become a way of life for me over the last 30 years, so this has been a typical Wednesday overall.

One of the things that discourages me is that the United States is home to millions of people who listen to AM talk radio and watch Fox News Channel, get virtually all their information from those sources, then actually believe they're the best-informed people on the planet. In reality, they tend to be painfully piss-ignorant and can be easily spotted because they repeat crap they hear on the Limbaugh and Hannity shows verbatim. Then they're allowed to vote, and wind up ruining life for innocent bystanders like me.

I'm reading a book by Jack Germond called Fat Man Fed Up, which was published in 2004 and is generally about How American Politics Went Bad. When I first began watching political talk shows on television years ago, Jack Germond was often a panelist in one of the liberal seats. He was a regular on The McLaughlin Group, the PBS show I still watch today. Anyway, Germond writes really well and has opinions I tend to agree with, so he's a favorite. The chapter I'm currently reading is called "Those Insidious Polls" and explains how political polling has contributed to the decline of American civilization.

This is timely, because the issue that has the blogosphere heated up today is a new Zogby poll that has Speedo leading Obama by about five points among likely voters. I can't be positive, but this may be the first national poll that gives Speedo a clear lead. Usually he and Barry are tied, or Barry's up by a few points. Margin-of-error stuff.

No surprise here. Today, the liberal blogs are mostly doom-and-gloom, and the conservatives are thumping their chests, doing their gloat yodels, high fives, and the victory dance, and generally having themselves a gay old time. If the libs think it's bad now, wait until November. The Zogby poll comes on the heels of the Russian invasion, during which Ace played make-believe and pretended to be commander-in-chief, and the Saddleup faith forum, during which Ace regaled an auditorium full of rightwing evangelunicals with his snappy one-liners. I don't know if either circumstance influenced the poll results, but might have.

The bottom line is that polls are at best an approximation of the uninformed opinions of a few thousand people, at least half of whom are yahoos, dumbasses, and dipshits. The polls may or may not have a connection with reality, but ironically can shape reality because people take them seriously. Thank you, Jack Germond, for clearing that up.

Although I voted for him in the Texas primary, I've never been sold on Obama. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt regarding his potential ability to be an effective president, but I've never taken him seriously as a candidate. When he and Hillary separated themselves from the other Dem wannabes, I turned my attention to the Republican race, which is where I knew the next president was coming from.

If the Dems had picked Mrs Clinton instead, it's probable she'd also be behind Ace today, maybe even trailing by a wider margin. The difference is that she wouldn't have spent the last few weeks diddling around like Obama has. She'd be launching a daily barrage of kicks aimed at Speedo's groin, and probably landing quite a few. What she couldn't destroy with well-placed kicks, she'd go after with a straight razor. In that sense, Hillary as the Dem nominee would be a lot more fun to watch in action than Barry has been. A concept that Dems have not yet grasped: If you're gonna lose anyway, go down fighting.

The economic news continues to be bleak. For some reason, inflation rates are usually discussed in terms of "core prices," which disregard increases in food and energy costs. This is another of those things about economics that confuse me. I can get along nicely without cell phones, large-screen plasma TVs, a Cadillac Escalade, designer sneakers and jeans, and lots of other shit, but it's a reasonable certainty I'm always gonna be in the market for food and energy. So what I'm mainly interested in is how prices in those areas are doing.

It would be nice if the doughnut-munchers in Speedo's press entourage ganged up on him and demanded that he clarify, once and for all, specifically what he plans to do differently than Jorge and what he plans to do the same. If we're going to be forced to live with this chickenshit F for four years, it'd be helpful to know what he has in mind for us. So far, his whole campaign can be summarized like this: " Vote for me. I'm not the N..."