Pressdog.com

Send in the Non-Partisans

By Bill Zahren
(Posted 11/22/00)

My previous idea of Al and George W. tossing a coin or Scottish caber on the White House lawn to determine the winner is starting to look pretty good. OK, in week 23 of the Election Fiasco 2000, what have we learned:

The network graphics guys do a nice job. Rule One in TV is if you’re going to have an ongoing story, you need to come up with a snappy identifying graphic to run when the talking heads are spewing on about nothing.

So we’re getting artfully rendered “Florida Recount” banners across the bottom of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS et al. My personal favorite so far is ABC’s banner “A Nation Waits,” which successfully imparts all the breathy, sky-is-falling hyperbole we’ve come to know and love from TV “coverage.”

People should just back off Katherine Harris' appearance. Just shut up about Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris’ clothes, makeup and hair style, ‘kay? I saw some woman on Inside Edition or some equally useless show using a telestrater to point out how Katherine should clean it up. Lipstick too dark for her suit. Too much eye shadow. That’s cheap and stupid. For about three minutes I was too stunned to turn the channel. And if you’re going to play that game, the makeup analyst could use a few tips herself, if you get my drift.

Harris is just trying to do her job. I can understand her arguments, even if I don’t agree. But all this personal stuff is lame. And I’m even a Democrat. Of course the males involved never seem to get their fashion and grooming critiqued. Imagine that.

Just back off the locals. They’re doing their best down there. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to be in their places, with 985 reporters scrutinizing your every bowel movement.

People should just back off the justi. If you don’t like the Secretary of State’s decisions, you take her to court. That’s the way it’s set up. That’s why we got courts, so nobody has to break out the weaponry and fight it out. But if the Supreme Court justices (justi) rule against you, don’t be coming around screaming “Democratic appointees!” Lame.

Stop spewing. You go to court. You say your piece. You get the ruling. Appeal or shut up. Bing, bang, boom. Enough with the “everyone is motivated by politics” already. It’s like bawling to the zebras at a basketball game. You look like a total gimp.

I know, let’s organize the military! Let’s get a junta in there! Ends justify the means, baby! What is this, Cuba? I hear Slobodon is available. Maybe he could help you out. Ixnay on the Banana Republic talk. Take it inside (the courthouse). That’s the way it works.

Mash all those frickin’ piece-of-crap hole-punch vote machines in a car crusher. Whose brainstorm was this paper punch ballot system anyway? Works like a charm! I would personally donate $100 to a fund drive to replace all those hole-punch machines in Florida and everywhere else with something a little more reliable, like voting by a show of hands. How about this: You get two marbles, one red and one blue. Put the red one in the jar if you want to vote for George and the blue one in the jar if you want to vote for Al. Makes as much sense.

I say mound up all the hole-punch machines and use the butterfly ballots to set them on fire. Thanks to this system I now know that a “chad” is more than just a big country in Africa or the name of a Marine I know. You got pregnant chads, dimples, blah, blah, blah.

It’s just more to argue about. Republican freaks say the chad has to be completely gone from the ballot and have actually hit the ground AND been stepped on before the ballot should count. Democrat freaks say merely the presence of a scuff on the ink outline of the chad indicates an intent to vote for Gore. Here’s a tip: shut up.

We’re incredibly screwed as a country either way. Whoever “wins,” the other side will be so enraged, so bitter to the core of their beings, that we’ll get four years of ugly crap. Either the Democrats or the Republicans will “steal” the election. So we’ll have months and years of scheming and spewing and maneuvering just to make the other side look like crap. Nice. My tax dollars at work.

Here’s a tip: the country will be fine with either guy. The presidency is pretty cool, but it’s not like he or she is a czar. Part of the reason the Founders made government such a conflicted mess was so that nobody could just ram stuff through.

Good luck attracting more participation in politics. I’ve thought of volunteering to help political campaigns before, but then I look at the freaked out, win-at-any-cost partisans that I’d have to deal with and I scurry for cover.

These people give the impression that they’d ask your party affiliation before agreeing to call you an ambulance. They pray for Gore’s plane to crash. They ask God to strike down G.W. It's one zealot freak show I don’t want any part of. I’ll vote, but I can’t say I’m excited about doing so knowing we’re just replacing one group of rabid partisan dogs with another.

Here’s a tip: if you’re a Democrat, not every Republican has his foot on the poor folks’ throat. If you’re a Republican, not every Democrat is Karl Marx.

The only consolation is somebody has to win by January 10. Here’s hoping we all survive that long.

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