Greater Satellites

This commercial sucks and it seems to be on every single commercial break for the shows that I watch. It’s sad because I really dig that song and it fits very poorly with the on screen action, unless of course Microsoft’s brilliant marketing team is going for that audio-visual irony thing… Which I doubt.

Tomorrow we as Americans vote. I’ve never voted before, although I am registered. I’m considering going tomorrow for the whole 5 minutes it will probably take and just pulling the Democrat lever or button or rotary crank or whatever it is you tug/push/operate. I’m so disillusioned with politics that I want as little to do with it as possible. I know the decisions that they make will ultimately affect me, but unless I were to get seriously involved I probably wouldn’t be able to change much. I’m sure that’s the mentality of a lot of young Americans: “I’m just one of millions, how will my voice be heard?”. Winston Churchill (a pretty smart guy, in case you didn’t know) said something that made me laugh: “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

I really dislike the enlongated processes for passing new laws, the slander campaigns that run non-stop on television right around this time, the “Vote For ______” signs that literally pollute major roads (I’m looking squarely at you, Boulevard), the bickering between the two sides, the fact that there are only two sides, candidates who tell lies, candidates who tell half-truths, and it downright infuriates me that those fucking clowns in Washington make $165,000 a year (after, of course, voting to raise their own salaries, something a surprising number of them finally agreed on) and only worked 93 days so far this year. You have to be kidding me.

I did a little research earlier today and found that not one candidate is standing for everything I believe in… Which doesn’t surprise me, for the record, I just wanted to establish that fact. I find it difficult to objectively choose a potential candidate based on political platform alone. Further, it’s difficult for me to choose someone just based on their individual stances. I need to know the person, not the politics, but you’d be hard pressed to find these wankers anywhere accessible the other 11 months of the year. I will vote for a candidate who I don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye with if I believe he or she is genuine, but I’m not willing to go above and beyond just to sit at an affair, albeit formal or informal, with said politician to really get to know them. Some of the ads, however, do give us a bit of insight from time to time. In the course of all these smearing campaigns, I’ll discover that Politician X was at a strip club with so and so and he was drinking *GASP* ALCOHOL. I believe those ads are attempting to make me think: “This man has loose morals and therefore is no kind of leader! He is stricken from my voting palette!” BUT, here’s what the ad actually accomplishes in my mind: “However he decides to spend his leisure time is totally up to him. If sipping on a Long Island Iced Tea and seeing a nice pair of titties bouncing in his face relieves the stress of a hard days work for him (it does, by the way), then right on. Hey, I could really go for a lap dance right about now…” The more “normal” a candidate seems, the more likely they are to get my vote (in my mind, and perhaps in actuality tomorrow).

This is the longest I’ve spent waxing semi-intellectual about politics… probably in my whole life. It’s making my brain hurt and filling me with rage so I will stop now. I hope, at the very least, some light has been shed on how my mind operates when it comes to politics (hint: the answer is either not at all or with incredible fury). Good talk, good talk.

Did I mention this commercial sucks?