Reading the front page of NY Times, there are pages on pages on pages of results sliced by age, gender, and race, and almost nothing about the actual issues. There was one a fleeting mention of immigration issues on the Republican side, other than that - nothing.
And NY Times is a high-brow publication. I am afraid to think what gets discussed on TV (we don't use TV at home - the information bandwidth is way too narrow; I can read news on the Internet 10 times as fast as watching them on TV).
How do we elect politicians, anyway? What are the important decision factors?
Let's see... Howard Dean - "The Screech" all but ended his campaign. John Kerry - "appears French". John Edwards - "The $400 Haircut". Hillary squeezes out a tear - and wins New Hampshire primary - where polls just a few days before had shown Obama in the lead.
I am sorry, but democracy's most important precondition is the demos which is intellectually capable of making choices!
So what kind of candidates does THIS democracy produce? Of the recent political figures, we have:
- Reagan - a movie star.
- Tom Delay (former House Majority Leader) - an exterminator. Yes, really, I am not joking, he used to kill roaches!
- Arnold Schwarzenegger - a movie star.
- George W. Bush - a former drunk and a village idiot, not even capable of coherent speech.
- Dick Cheney - a college dropout that had "been in a couple of scrapes with the law", and the best prototype for the Emperor Palpatine, if Joe Lieberman would not have already looked like a photographic twin.
As they say in Florida...
3 comments:
Wow! "This country!" Glad you're still Russian to the bone :)
Ahem... Bush vs. Putin... Bush vs. Putin... Now that's a tough choice :-).
The reality is, as I was saying to my wife just a few days back, all the stuff we hate Bush for - the militarism, the torture, the contempt for human and civil rights, the cronyism - all this is so commonplace in Russia, that it's not even mentioned...
I say : great country! All you need is STOP READING POLITICAL news. Just ignore it :-) No TV - Yezz!!! Good. Now... all you need is instead cnn.com and such read slashdot.com ( if at all - politics goes there too, but realty only important stuff - like one that could actually be applied to you in airport for example , not to some dude in Gvatemalo) If you do so ... it will be peace ... Like I can not promise that giant meteorite will not hit Earthn your life time, but ... at least till that moment you will enjoy life. :-) Reading political news will just get to your nerves unless you want to do some thing about it and that would not be fun as well. So just relax and enjoy the ride. It is a good one ... really :-)
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