Election Day. Sigh.

Today is Election Day here in The Old Dominion*, and those of us who care will be electing a governor, an attorney general, and various other lesser luminaries. The choices are not inspiring.

Even by modern standards, the governor's race here in Virginia has been dirty and shrill, full of foul mudslinging, baseless charges, distortions of records, and statistics used wildly out of any context. If you pay attention to the advertisements that run every 13 seconds on TV and radio, we have a choice for governor between a far-right social conservative who would probably be too extreme for the most remote one-camel town in Saudi Arabia, and a crook who is just foaming at the mouth to be elected so that he can immediately raise taxes through the roof and spend his days in rapt adoration of an extreme liberal agenda that recklessly rids Virginia of jobs. At this point, there's no telling what the truth is, and no way of knowing what the candidates stand for, because it tends to shift based on the latest poll results ... and in any case, nobody is talking about issues Real People care about because they're too busy piling mud and insults on each other to do anything as mundane as explaining their own positions.

I'm glad that we use the sort of voting machines here in Virginia that use touch screens operated by a single finger ... it leaves the other hand free to hold one's nose.

The robo-calls are the worst part of any election season. I hate unsolicited political calls anyhow, but those that are simply programmed to deliver a recorded message are the worst. Had Dante but known when he wrote his Inferno, he would have probably created a separate level of hell for the inventor of the political robo-call. You don't even have the satisfaction of asking a live caller to explain his (or her) candidate's position on specific issues, telling him (or her) that his (or her) candidate is an ignorant dumbass, or just hanging up**.

I'm going to vote, anyhow, because that's what I'm supposed to do. But given the choices I have this year, it's not going to be fun.

Have a good day. Vote. If you don't, you have no right to complain about the results.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* That's what we endearingly call Virginia, when we're not mad at it.

** Even hanging up on an unwanted caller isn't very satisfying any more ... back in the days when a telephone was made of bakelite and solid steel and weighed about 75 pounds, you could slam the receiver down with a satisfying crash that sent an unmistakeable message and probably broke the table on which it sat. Nowadays, telephones are made of cheap plastic and printed circuits and are hung up by daintily pressing the "off" button ... if you slam a modern cordless telephone back into its cradle, it will shatter into a million expensive pieces.