Monarchy Now!

Hey everyone, tomorrow is election day and if you're anything like me you plan to get up early, toddle down to your local election site and poke blindly at a voting machine to make your selections for a bunch of midterms you couldn't possibly give a shit about, school board races you have no stake in whatsoever and ballot initiatives you don't even understand. Hurray for Democracy!

Above: Stupid idiots wasting their time.

"Suck on it."

-people who vote in the midterms

Why do we do this? Well, most of us don't, but for those of us who do it's a weird combination of the guilt we'll feel if we don't and the sense of smug superiority we get from those ' I Voted' stickers they give you. Of course, there's also spite. According to this, political polarization is at an all-time high. Yeah, all-time high. To be clear, that includes the time we, as a nation, once spent four years killing each other over whether or not it was ok to own people and make them work for no money.

Oh don't look at me like that.
Shouldn't you be comptrolling?

We don't even vote for people or things anymore, we vote against. I mean, it's really hard to get people motivated to weigh-in on things like Comptroller or Water Commissioner. Like, those things are boring and lame and nobody gives a shit. On the other hand, we give plenty of shits about voting against those yacht-owning, gun-humping misogynistic fascists (or those gay-marrying, tax-happy godless baby-killers if that's how you roll...you tool). Sometimes I'll just vote for everyone with a 'D' next to their name-not because I love one party, but because I hate the other one. Yeah, I'm part of the problem.

But can you really blame me? When someone's trying tell people who they can and can't marry or what they can and can't do with their bodies, it's almost always a Republican. Even if I thought one of them had a good idea (I don't, but go with me on this), I could never vote for one because of all the horseshit that comes along with them.

It's like being a vegan at a party where the only food is pizza and
nobody understands why you don't just pick the pepperoni off.*

"Low unemployment? Healthcare?
Looks like we got here just in time."

Polls indicate that the Republicans are going to win a majority in the Senate tomorrow. Not because the Democrats are necessarily bad a their jobs (unemployment is way down and the Dow is way up), but because Republicans are really good at spending money on ads that convince elderly white men that Obamacare and gays are the reason they don't understand music these days and why all the kids wear their dungarees too low and-see? I'm doing it again. Yes, the GOP, as a thing, is awful and stands for everything wrong in the world but that's not really a productive attitude is it?

Fun and reassuring yes, I mean who doesn't love to have their worldview reaffirmed? But it's not getting us anywhere. I'm not sure that there's really a solution here short of abolishing political parties or maybe selling ourselves back to Britain-both of which sound pretty damn good right now. Anyway, go vote...you know, for all the good it does...

"Well, well, well...having second thoughts about all that independence business are we?"

-The Queen, still riding high

on her victory over the Scots

*the answer, of course, is murder-juice and cheese.