I am hoping that once the elections are over that some of these celebrities will quietly sidle back under their rocks. There’s something about (to choose a victim at random) a drunken Tara Reid, who should have sought better advice on finding a surgeon for her tummy tuck, declaiming on her political views and the fate of America that rubs me the wrong way.

Seriously, if you can’t find a better plastic surgeon–and apparently it is pretty darned easy–how am I supposed to believe what you think about the Iraq war? If you aren’t able to do simple searches for surgeons by field and state, what are you going to tell me about social policy?

Nothing, I say.

We tend to mistake beauty for intelligence in society. But when we examine some of the beautiful people more closely, we see that they haven’t shown intelligence in their choice of doctors. Please, if you want to be intelligent–you actually have to be intelligent.  Good doctors, good handiwork, are easily found if you shop around, ask good questions, and strive towards physical needs your body actually has, needs a good doctor will work with, reconstructively or otherwise.

Else–back under the rock with you!

First, in the spirit of things, a bit of disclosure. I have never voted for a winning presidential candidate. I voted for Michael Dukakis–hence Dukakis, our number four cat. I voted for Ross Perot, not once, but twice. I voted for Al Gore. I voted for Michael Badnarik, just because Bush and Kerry both filled me with deep distaste. Now I’m in a bit of a quandary.

Why? you ask. Well, because I take a certain amount of pride in my failure to back winning horses. This was easy to do in light of the fact that three of these election cycles I backed third party candidates, and only once did one of them have the faintest chance in hell of winning. Now I have no idea who is going to win. National polling is somewhat ambiguous. Barack Obama leads most of these polls by a comfortable six to seven percent: or does he? If you inject the third, fourth,and fifth parties his lead diminishes into what I would call the margin of error territory. This falls within the so-called Bradley effect, so-called for Tom Bradley’s runs at the California governorship in 1982 and 1986. Are respondents to polls completely honest? Are all persons who say they will vote for Obama actually going to do so, or will enough of them bleed off to inaction or to McCain that Obama will narrowly lose–perhaps again to the Electoral College’s fabled silliness? Will the aspirations of America’s first potential half-white, half black President of African immigrant descent be stymied by secret racism? Or will the underreporting of the cell-phone-wielding youth-vote make up the difference? Or will the youth-vote be sucking on their bongs or vote for McKinney or Nader instead on election day?

How does this affect me? Well, how can I vote for the losing candidate if I don’t know who it is? Do I vote for McCain assuming the the polls are telling the truth? Do I vote for Obama assuming the worst of my fellow Americans–i.e., that they are racist liars? Either way is a crap shoot. The security of saying that I voted for the loser so I am not responsible for the winner’s idiot policies may be denied to me.

I am not happy about this. The third parties are no lure this time. I won’t vote for any of them on principle. (Part of the rules of the game is I will not vote for a candidate that I could not stomach to see President.) McKinney is a lunatic, and the Greens bear heavy responsibility for Bush’s election in 2000. Nader is now half a lunatic, who ran Green that fateful year. How can I vote for Bob Barr, seeing as he was one of the point men in the Great Clinton-hunt of 1999. The rest of them are just bonkers.
The only real option may be not voting.

Unlike last time, I’ve pretty much stayed out of the stupid election circus, but I really have to say I think that once again, the Democrats are taking a pretty sure thing and blowing it.

Exhibit A: even if Obama had a lead, would he have a lead?

Exhibit B: out of the British media, word that a senior Democratic stratgist thinks Obama’s people

are on the verge of blowing the greatest gimme in the history of American politics. They’re the most arrogant bunch I[’]ve ever seen. They won’t accept that they are losing and they won’t listen.

I mean, seriously, seven years of war, economic muddling, natural disaster, and growing international isolation and discontent, and Obama is behind to a man rather closely tied to Bush? One woman from Alaska can’t be the cause of all this.
Of course, my personal stance that whoever is elected President, they will face problems* of such a vast magnitude** that it won’t matter whether they are -R or -D. But what do I know.

___________________

*In which case we had better be drilling in Alaska.

**In which case drilling in Alaska could make things worse.