The Doldrums

Even dedicated political junkies get to a place where they can't eat another sound bite. I'm there. I'm curious to see if the polls shift away from McCain this week--I have a feeling they might if Palin's bloom fades a bit (ironic that the McCain campaign chose to attack Obama as a celebrity, then answered with a celebrity of their own, but this whole campaign has been an unreal blizzard of ironies from Day One)--but I'm pretty much resigned that it's going to be back-and-forth, back-and-forth until the debates start at the end of the month. "When the still sea conspires an armor/And her sullen and aborted currents breed tiny monsters...."

In the meantime, I'll let Hunter S. Thompson sum up my feelings....

"Many appeared to be in the terminal stages of Campaign Bloat, a gruesome kind of false-fat condition that is said to be connected somehow with failing adrenal glands. The swelling begins within twenty-four hours of that moment when the victim first begins to suspect that the campaign is essentially meaningless. At that point, the body’s entire adrenaline supply is sucked back into the gizzard, and nothing either candidate says, does, or generates will cause it to rise again…and without adrenaline, the flesh begins to swell; the eyes fill with blood and grow smaller in the face, the jowls puff out from the cheekbones, the neck-flesh droops, and the belly swells up like a frog’s throat…The brain fills with noxious waste fluids, the tongue is rubbed raw on the molars, and the basic perception antennae begin dying like hairs in a bonfire."