Nowadays I prefer to think of myself as a Canadian, but I was born and raised in the USA, so I still care what happens to the Great Experiment in Democracy.\u00a0 Sadly, it seems to be over.<\/p>\n
The 2014 midterm elections are only a few days away now, and if you believe the deluge of panicked Emails from various progressive Democrats (many of whom I have already sent a few bucks), the Republicans are about to commandeer Congress due to the massive funding of attack ads on TV by the Kochs and other billionaire friends of the Repos.\u00a0 The Dems’ idea is to repurpose the demonstrated power of social media to “crowd-source” a counterattack.<\/p>\n
I’ve stopped donating, and I’m about to stop caring.\u00a0 Want to know why?\u00a0 It’s not because I’ve suddenly turned more conservative in my old age.\u00a0 It’s not because I’ve decided to throw my lot in with what appears to be the winning side.\u00a0 It’s not even because whichever side “wins”, the shadow government seems hardly affected (although that is a contributing factor).<\/p>\n
It’s because everyone seems to have accepted the premise that elections are decided mainly by who can afford the most TV time for their attack\/defense ads.<\/p>\n
Either this is untrue<\/em>, in which case I am profoundly disappointed in the Democrats who are trying to convince us of it, or it’s true<\/em>, in which case I am so nauseated by the electorate that I can’t help hoping they get just what they deserve — even though the rest of us will probably perish with them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nowadays I prefer to think of myself as a Canadian, but I was born and raised in the USA, so I still care what happens to the Great Experiment in Democracy.\u00a0 Sadly, it seems to be over. The 2014 midterm elections are only a few days away now, and ifRead More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"gutentor_comment":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}