Hypocrisy? What's that mean? |
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It's that time of year again. The chill is slowly
creeping into the air, the months on the calendar are crawling perilously
close to December and the leaves are slowly starting to shrivel and fall
from their arboreal dwellings. Normally that means
it's time to drag out the sweaters and winter jackets and bid adieu to
the shorts and sandals we've spent so much time with recently, but this
year is special. As any elementary school child can tell you (hopefully),
there is one really important event in this country that happens every
four years. That's right, the Summer Olympics! The kids would spout off about how the Games are so special because they're a gathering of the world's best athletes coming together in peaceful, honorable competition. As a distant afterthought, these kids would also probably mutter something about how the presidential election happens once every four years, too. But while the Olympics are about the aforementioned sense of honor and competition between the world's best, the circus that is the race to November is about the nation's best connected and best funded coming together in a cranky fight for the killer soundbite and the fickle minority vote. Only in this country do you get the special treat of deciding how you want to spend your free time every fourth year. You can spend it watching a bunch of underpaid amateur athletes striving to be the best they can be or watching a bunch of overpaid amateur academics striving to be just as good as they have to be to win enough votes. Ah, America... And with the presidential election -- or any election, public gathering or bingo night, for that matter -- comes the incessant nitpicking of every participant by the members of the media. "BINGO! I win!" "Not so fast, Ethel. Isn't it true that you still have a fifty-cent late fee at the Orland Park Elementary Library? And that you were once caught cheating on a relationships quiz in Cosmo? Ladies and gentlemen, this woman doesn't even rewind the videos she checks out at her local Blockbuster. Do we really want someone like her walking out of here with a brand new 8-speed blender?" We saw it in full effect eight years ago when Clinton was first waltzing into the White House and then caught a replay four years ago when he was fighting to stay there. He dodged this draft, didn't inhale this drug, didn't sleep with this woman, or this woman, or this woman, etc. And now it's started again. The latest addition to the unnecessary information file comes regarding Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney. It was just announced that the fair oil industry CEO did not vote in 14 of the past 16 elections when he was living in the ritzy Highland Park enclave of Dallas, Texas. This comes opposite Sen. Joe Lieberman's, his Democratic competitor's, voting record of five out of the past six in his home state of Connecticut and Gore's not missing any since 1972. (Big surprise there. How much do you want to be that Gore was a hard-nosed hall monitor with white tape holding his black glasses together in grammar school? "Slow down there, mister. Jokers who run will never have fun. It's those who go slow that will make all the dough...") |
Well I think I speak for everyone on hand when I say,
"Whoop-dee-fricking-doo." Are we seriously going to persecute this guy for this? Who the hell cares? Yes, ideally a political figure we elect to share in the small task of running the country should be engulfed in the political way of life. He (or she) should live and breathe the ins and outs of proposed amendments and reforms. They should dream about foreign affairs and the state of the Middle East and they should become positively aroused when thinking about reducing the national debt. In a perfect world, this would be so. Alas, we are not living in a perfect world Ð just look at the fact that Roseanne posed naked in Gear magazine and that Rudy lost on Survivor for proof. (Actually, I care about my readers, so maybe you should just ignore the first one...) If we're going to crucify Cheney for not going out and voting, then we better be prepared to turn that fury on ourselves. In the last presidential election, a whopping 165 million people did not vote. That's roughly 60% of the population, the lowest total in years. Now I know we didn't have much to choose from Ð either an adulterer too afraid to admit he used drugs to get high, or an antiquated war hero too proud that he does use drugs to get parts of himself, ahem, high. All things being equal, I went for the champion of penile perkiness, not the chump of perennial penile poking. (Dole also waved to me from the floor of the Senate on a vacation several years ago, thus solidifying his hero status in my mind...) But that's no excuse. Even though the polls didn't have much to offer, I still went out and voted on the lesser of two evils. So what that my man lost? If I quit after one failure, I'd have become a devout monk at the age of five when Jenny O' Connor slapped me for kissing her in my backyard. And as bad as the voter turnout was four years ago, early predictions are that this year will be even worse. According to various news agencies the expected turnout this November is a dismal 30%. Are people still hurting from Nixon's loss in 1960 or from Blaines's stunning defeat in the late 1800s? As great as these guys were, I honestly don't think so. Some of it can be written off to the fact that the current state of politics is enough to turn anyone off faster than a strip show by Sally Struthers. A lot of it goes to the fact that Americans are just lazy. We've gotten fat on the huge turkey that is the American economy and now we're getting sleepy and need a nap. When this November comes, though, I urge everyone to fight off that siesta a little longer and rebutton your pants. None of the current candidates have ever waved to me or even uttered a half-hearted, "Hello," but when the time comes you can bet I'll be at the polls, and I push all of you to do the same. The Jenny O' Connors of the world need to know that we''re not a bunch of quitters. |