All About Trey

Election Time Madness

It's ALL HATE, ALL THE TIME!!

We still have a week to go and I'm about to reach breaking point. Living in the eye of the storm, and giving a damn, makes a bad combination. So where to start?

Let's see. Sunday as I was dressing for church I happened upon Meet the Press with MD's senatorial candidates, Cardin and Steele. Now I know nothing about Cardin, and since I don't vote in Maryland that's okay. But Steele is definitely a prominent character. Him I know. But as Matt Russell pointed out, if you looked at his ads, his posters, his website, you wouldn't know that he was a Republican. Steele joked that he was being outed, but this intentional deception, is just typical of what is going on around the country by the Republicans. And then there was the "Steele Democrat" bumpersticker. How can that not be disingenous? And oh by the way, exactly what type of voters is Steele trying to fool into thinking that he's a democrat? Could it be the under educated, or under uninformed, that Steele is trying to dupe? How proud you must be to say that you've won becuase you've fooled people into thinking they voted for a black democrat?

Monday there was a great op-ed in the Post called The Decline of Trust. It's good article, but I don't think that it addresses some of the underlying reasons why we don't trust politicians anymore. For some reason, politics has become the land of zero tolerance for mistakes. You can't say that you were wrong. That maybe some action or opinion or decision was wrong. There's some strange fever that's gripped the political world where ANY admission of failure, of fallibility, or error, will some how become this pandora's box where EVERY decision will then be questioned, interrogated (but of course not via waterboarding) or judged in perfect 20-20 hindsight. The interesting resulting effect is that now politicians are in a position where they have to say that they were right, when there is all evidence to the contrary. Either the evidence is dismissed (no, we're WINNING in Iraq!), or there's some strange parsing of past statements that make Clinton's "It's depends' on what "is" is" comment seem quaint. Of course that distinguished parsing was about oral sex, which is obviously more important than say the reason we went to war in Iraq.

As part of my new, new, new . . . new gym routine, I've been going to the gym in the AM to do cardio. So I get stuck watching TV while I jam to my MP3 player. This morning, I swear that every commercial break had atleast one political ad. And I think I saw back to back Cardin, Erhlich, Allen ads. And none of them are pretty by the way. Especially the Allen ads. And I learned this little bit of info:

"The National Republican Senatorial Committee sank an astonishing $1,087,692.50 into the (Allen) race this morning alone, new FEC filings show. . . . Key footnote: The vast majority of the GOP money — $1,074,800 — will be spent on negative ads attacking Webb, rather than promoting Allen himself."

Nice. Of course this is from the party that purposely tries to reduce voter turnout via letters to immigrants in CA threating with deportation, or by jamming "get-out-the-vote" phone banks in Maine. While almost all of the nastiness I've described is being done by both Democrats and Republicans (though much more by the Republicans), I've yet to hear of any story where democrats are willfully, purposely, and more importantly illegally trying to prevent voters that might support the other party.

Let's think about that for a moment. To win an election in our great democracy, there are some elements of the Republican party that are purposely, willfully, and potentially illegally trying to get people either not to vote, or to confuse them so their vote doesn't match their intentions.

Nice.

posted by Trey @ 9:04 PM