Political fanatics are idiots… or morons, I haven’t yet decided…

I think people who are rabidly rooting for any politician are idiots. Ok, maybe not idiots… perhaps morons. Yeah, that’s better. I’m going with “morons,” people: deal with it.

I shall elucidate. 🙂 Unless you are the candidate himself (or herself, don’t get your knickers in a twist, ladies), you were sired by the candidate, you are the lifelong spouse of the candidate, or are somehow related by blood to the candidate, there is simply no way that you could be so sure that the person isn’t some conniving scuzzbucket that isn’t lying through his teeth about everything he says, and is secretly scheming to take over the world while stroking a cat all day in his hidden evil lair?

Actually, you could even argue that if you’re related or married to the candidate you’re definitely sure that he’s a lying scuzzbucket (like that time he told you your cat Miffy had gone to a farm in the country when in reality it had been in-grained in an 18-wheeler’s tires, or like that time he told you he was working late in the office when in reality he was doing lines of coke off of the ass of a Brazilian hooker he met in Cabo).

How could people that have never met the candidate adore him so much, how can they be so sure he’s the one who’s gonna save the nation from foreign attacks and fix the economy and create jobs and make kittens crap gold and turn the Grand Canyon into a flowing river of milk and honey and convert the Everglades into a sugarplum forest full of gumdrops and candycanes? Maybe I’m just a cynic (yeah, right, “maybe”)… but how can you be so sure of any of that if you personally don’t know the guy? Or even if you do personally know the guy? Or even if you are the guy? (I mean, it’s real easy to over-estimate one’s own abilities as a creator of a sugarplum forest).

What is your own take on this topic? Is over-zealous fanatism for a political candidate reasonable? [Note that if you say it is, I will think you are a moron: you have been warned!]

Advertisement

I just voted!

I just came back from voting. The supermarket where I thought they had early voting polling stations did not have any (actually, one of their employees told me she herself had heard radio commercials saying there would be voting stations there, too, but their manager had told them that wasn’t so: democracy and bureaucracy working together again)! So, I ended up voting at Home Depot. Not exactly poetic, but hey, whatever.

So, the process itself was ridiculously simple, so simple in fact that even a Florida voter would not have been able to fuck it up. Everything took place on a computer screen (which looked touch-screen but wasn’t, and it was fortunate that someone explained the process to me before beginning because otherwise I would have quickly started feeling quite disenfranchised had I thought they had given me a booth with a faulty touch-screen!); there was a scroll wheel that you rolled around to change the current selection (kind of like an iPod, but more democratic), and a button you pushed to go to the next screen.

You could vote straight down party lines or choose exactly the candidates you wanted, even for some positions that I didn’t even know existed and suspect are made-up, like County Commissioner, Constable, County Tax Assessor, and Bejeweled High Priestess of the Gjórì Nôoku Order (although I might be wrong about that last one). At the end of the process it reviewed whom you chose for each position (even the ones I suspect are fake), and you hit a button that said “Submit Ballot” (Note for Florida voters: that button would submit your ballot), and voilà! (Note for Florida votes: “voilà” means roughly “that’s it”).

All in all, it was definitely worth the 5 minutes it took to vote. 🙂

I’m about to vote!

I am about to leave to go vote, to exercise that inalienable right we all have that is utterly important for our country; well, no, not necessarily, at least not where I live.

See, in Texas, thanks to the ever-so-clever electoral college system, voting is a waste of time and money. One party always has a majority of the vote; so, if you vote for the majority party, your unnecessary vote will not help your candidate win another swing state where he actually needs your vote, and if you vote for the minority party, your insufficient vote will not be enough to win your candidate your state’s electoral votes.

Still, it’s not like I would be curing cancer if I stay at home; plus, I am going to vote at a supermarket and I needed some milk anyway, so what the hey!

I have decided to go alone because of the people I would have gone with are rabidly political, whereas I am more neutral and am doing it mostly because I had never voted here before and wanted to see what the process was like (would I have to deal with pregnant chads, pulling levers, using a touch-screen, make my mark with goat’s blood, or what have you).

One of the reasons I wanted to go alone was I really hate when people ask you: “Who did you vote for?”. For starters, it’s “Whom did you vote for?”, but I guess that’s neither here nor there (which makes me wonder where the fuck it is, after all). Anyhoo, I feel it’s like being in a store’s dressing room and asking the guy in the stall next to you what his waist size is: true, it’s not like it’s a state secret whose violation will cost thousands of lives, but still, really, it’s none of your fucking business. Finally, what’s the point of having a secret ballot voting system if you’re gonna be telling everyone whom you voted for, right?

I may decide to rant some more about politics after I’m done voting. Wish me luck! 😉