Well, Fuck YOU, America!

You disappoint me. I gave you seven days -- seven! -- to come to your senses and ditch that McCain asshole, and what did you do? Fall in love?

No, really, I think what's happened here is a combination of three things:

1. Polls, which apparently show McCain leading ever so slightly, are measures of popular support, supposedly. And yet, we live in an electoral college-kind of world, politically speaking. The polls can be as neck-and-neck as they like, but unless McCain can win two of the following: OH, PA, MI, FL, he has no chance at winning the presidency. That's a cold, hard fact.

2. The polls are ridiculously wrong. I have never claimed to get along with math, and I certainly am not about to read through dozens of different polling methodologies to find the gotcha! variable that makes the whole thing worthless. But, I was born with eyes and ears (sorry if you weren't). And my eyes and ears tell me, beyond any doubt, that Obama and Biden are drawing 10 times as many spectators to their campaign stops as McCain is to his. My eyes and ears tell me that Obama's supporters are far, far more active and passionate and persuasive than McCain's. My eyes and ears tell me that average people have more Obama stickers, yard signs, and t-shirts. I don't know who these "professional" pollsters are talking to, but they have made an error somewhere, because my brain is not lying to me. It is a matter of time, I think, until the predictors catch up with what common sense already tells most of us.

3. The horse race-style of reporting is wasting an enormous amount of our time at a moment when we have no time for foolishness. The media, in its little, bored existence, feels compelled by some perverse reasoning (likely having to do with laziness and a dearth of ideas, in that order) to portray this election, like each of the past 3 elections (including Clinton/Dole in 1996, even when it was clearly out of hand at the end), as being oh-so-close and my! so exciting! In other words, they're still stuck ooh-ing and ahhh-ing at the artificially-sweetened icing while the rest of us are waiting for the cake.

It will be no surprise to anyone reading this that the media is largely composed of simple, uncurious people, just the sort who can be diverted by a shiny object at the key moment. But let's be plain: even the dum-dum media knows that its behavior is contrived and in some ways counterproductive. Acting like idiots, journalists know, makes them look, well, like idiots. Even if they cannot grasp what a real journalist looks like, they acknowledge that "shaping the story" (or what we used to call "making shit up because it sounds good") isn't helpful to the debate or the public good -- it certainly violates the public trust. And so there are only two things the media, self-aware though still lacking in self-examination, can do. One is, it can go along, bury its head in the sand, and just repeat the same horsehit until it, the media, at least becomes inured to the smell. This is usually what it does, and this is the reason newspapers are now free on the internet, and why TV newscasts on any given night, combined, draw fewer viewers than sitcom reruns used to in the 1980s.

Or, it can do what it has done less often but still with some regularity: the media can stop, look, listen...and acknowledge reality. In 1992, Bill Clinton was walloping the living fuck out of a beleaguered and hopeless George HW Bush and the media refused to take any notice until October. But once it became just laughable to pretend any longer that the incumbent was in the race, Clinton sleepwalked ("sleptwalked"?) his way through the month and on to victory.

Now, that was a very bad thing, as far as the media was concerned. After it gave up trying to make the president seem like a contender, people stopped paying as much attention to what the press had to say about the election. And this, the withdrawal of public attention, cannot be allowed to happen, and was not allowed to happen from 1992-2008.

But the reason I think this time is different -- and to circle all the way back around to that to which I attested at the very start of this point -- is because the media has too much on its plate right now, today, to fuck around with making McCain's dead meat ass look viable.

We just lost 50% of the investment banks in this country in 6 months.

The stock market has fallen 500 points today. In the past year, it has declined more than three thousand points.

Millions of citizens have lost their homes and, with them, their good names.

The sitting president is losing control of both his foreign policy and his domestic, government-by-terror apparatus.

Americans, more than any other time in my lifetime, are scared.

That last fact cannot be ignored, even by a jerkoff press corps. Americans are afraid of the future for the first time in a long time, and faced with problems like these it is not hard to see why.

And every second the media wastes talking about John McCain's "serious" bid for the White House, or how Sarah Palin is "energizing" the GOP, is a second they have could have been addressing the very real and far more important problems facing most Americans.

The Republicans have fucked up, big time: you don't reignite the culture wars during a time of unprecedented crisis and upheaval; you start that bullshit at a time when the American public is fat, happy, and bored.

The media is starting to come around to the state of the nation -- diminishing are the tones of triviality and the insistence on coverage of the most banal, pointless, and sensationalistic storylines, real and imagined. All it takes to cut those obscene standards to shreds is for one anchor, one columnist, one pundit, to take a breath and ask, "do we really have time for this?"

The answer, naturally (and as we all know) is "no." And that's why this election will be about issues and not journalists' fantasies; why McCain, besides being the usual white Republican 10 years behind the curve, humping old methods while being battered by the new, can't run or hide behind his sub-moronic lies; why the American public is -- as my eyes and ears tell me -- so deeply invested in this political sea-change; why Obama will win. The choice is too stark, too easy, and too terrifying if we get it wrong: either America can be great again, can stave off an apocalypse admittedly of its own making by choosing a serious, qualified, thoughtful president; or else we can vote to self-immolate, bringing ruin upon ourselves, letting the wolves inside even as we pretend not to hear them outside the door.

Either we are a nation of simpletons, child-like in our love of convenient lies, or we are intelligent, serious people who make our own destinies.

There is only one answer.