Dear Voters, DO RESEARCH. Thank you.

Suppose that one of the presidential nominees said the following:

"My opponent has voted 100% of the time in favor of the no-child-left-behind Act, which has done more harm than good for our nation's children."

Following this statement, you're very likely to get a bunch of applause or hootin' and hollerin'. Why? Because, regardless of whether people understand the favorable or damning aspects of the no-child-left-behind series of bills many of us have gathered some opinion about it and we are either supporters or opposers (but not critics, because that would require us to UNDERSTAND something about the act). But, even if you know nothing about this act and have no opinion about it, if you are listening to your favorite nominee and don't very much like the other guy, this sentence is going to sound good to you and it's going to automatically GIVE YOU an opinion on the no-child-left-behind Act.

Political speeches are full of this kind of bullshit. Why? Because it works.

The average asshole doesn't know anything about the no-child-left-behind Act. The nominee tells him "the no-child-left-behind Act had done more harm than good" combined with "my opponent has voted for this lousy Act 100% of the time". Now, at this point, it doesn't matter if the opponent voted once in favor and then never voted against (1 out of 1 is still 100%). It also doesn't matter whether there is a clear consensus on the efficacy of the Act. What matters is that your pick for the white house is for something good and his opponent is clearly supports something bad.

It makes my blood boil.



I recently saw this clip of Palin saying the following:

"The fact is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers."

This sentence, as you can see at the end of the clip, is followed by a big cheer from the asshole crowd. Why? Because it sounds great to a bunch of uninformed conservatives (BIG and EXPENSIVE are real bad words to republican voters).

The problem is that, this statement, even in context, makes no fucking sense. Fannie and Freddie are privately owned companies. The government, now stepping in to fix a problem that was left to market forces, is making it "too big and too expensive" for the tax payers.

So what are those assholes clapping at? WHAT ARE THEY CLAPPING AT!!!!!!!! I'll tell you what they're clapping at, they're clapping because most of them don't even know who the fuck Freddie and Fannie are and they don't want to look like ignorant pricks. So they clap at the key word combination BIG+EXPENSIVE+TAX-PAYER

It makes my blood boil.

I had a friend in college who suggested that the voting privilege should only be given to people who were informed about current policy and the policy of the candidates. Namely, people who knew enough about each topic to understand what it means to "open up offshore drilling" or "reduce carbon emissions by 20% in 10 years". I used to think that there were just too many problems with the idea that voting should require some kind of test. That it was better to have an uniformed voter than to delegate all voting power to people who had the time to learn about all these key factors.

But after 2004 I realized that an ignorant man could be elected into office on the basis that:
A) the smarter man is believed to be a flip-flopper
B) people like to imagine that they could have a god damned beer with the president
C) a sizable majority of voters have this crazy notion that Republican = godly and Democratic = Satanly

It makes my blood boil.

I see McCain winning in 2008 because:
A) he was a POW who made it back through the will power gifted by the lord
B) voters seem to think experience counts (regardless of the fact that the level of a candidate's experience fails to correlate with any measure of success in the presidency)
C) The republican party lies to its potential voters and they are too uniformed to realize it.

Nobody gives a shit. None of this horribleness is important enough to make people spend 30 minutes a day learning about the issues. Yeah, I've heard people rationalize their apathy with the assumption that the president, himself, doesn't have any power over long term policy anyway. This kind of thinking magnifies the ignorance a thousand fold.

PS did you know that the guys who brought you the "HEAD ON APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD" product are actually turning a fantastic profit. did you know that there are a substantial number of people who actually read SPAM and even purchase things advertised in that SPAM?

I know this and I'm still shocked by the fact that there are people in America that voted for Bush ultimately because they'd rather have a beer with him than Kerry. That makes me an idiot too, I suspect.