Going Negative: A brief and self-indulgent rant

[Orrex]

:rant:

We're in the home stretch, and the media have begun their scheduled diatribes about which candidates have "gone negative" and how soon did they do it and why the Democrats are always so quick to go negative. I'm sure that you know someone who's uttered a version of the preprogrammed mantra "I get so fed up with the negativity that I just don't care anymore."

I have three words for such people: Boo Fucking Hoo.

This is politics, dammit. The fate of our nation is literally at stake, as is the fate of much of the world, and the average American voter is upset that some candidate somewhere has aired her opponent's dirty laundry?

Complaints about negative campaigning are disastrously naive, on par with saying "I'd like football if those fellows didn't slam into each other so much." Perhaps more appropriately, given the entertainment choices of the average American, the analogy should be "I'd like American Idol if it weren't for all the ego-shredding and the singing."

Campaigning has always been negative, or at the very least it has been so for many decades. It's not pretty, but that's how it goes.

Thanks for listening.