Billy, working from Tokyo just now, takes a moment to comment on the latest in that greatest of American endeavors: the race to be president. Yep, boy, when it comes to America the Beautiful, American know-how, and everything that was ever supposed to be terrific about America, isn’t it all just encapsulated in that every-four-year spectacle?

Everything we are, we owe to voting, elections, and American presidents.

Or so you’d think. Me? Well, I ran my enthusiasm for what Paul might do right up to the beginning of the primaries. My RSS reader is currently awash in weeks of as-yet unread posts from blogs that follow Paul. I’m still interested — as a side-note to the election, now — how his continued candidacy might effect the republican base, but it has nothing, really, to do with who’s going to be president.

Billy says:

A rational person cannot listen to it, except in the spirit of estimating storms on the horizon.

Though I would say that Paul’s campaign was of an entirely different character, including his crowds of whoopers, it’s certainly that for the entire lot of the rest of them on both sides. Guess what? I have yet to listen to a single second of broadcast or cable news on the whole affair, save for the few YouTube clips I’ve posted of some of Paul’s interviews and such. Haven’t watched a single debate (I’ve read and watched select excerpts). In fact, I don’t think I’ve had the TV on any kind of news channel (local or national) in a year, except CNBC during the trading day, and even that is no more than once every couple of weeks.

I expect that to continue. I also can’t read blogs that serve to "analyze" the political scene. It’s like listening to a sports station where a host and callers "analyze" the expected results of some sporting match on the mix of players and their past statistical performance. Maybe there’s some validity to that, but I think they’re by-and-large just fooling themselves. As to the election, this thing is going to march forward and some semblance of life is going to go on. I really am going to do my best to ignore most of it and live that life. I expect to be relentlessly anti-state in my blogging: raging against the warfare that currently excites the republicans, as well as the welfare that always excites the democrats. It’s two sides of the same coin.

But who knows? I just might end up getting tuned into this deal once it shakes out to the two principal players it’s going to be. At some level it can be hard to resist the national urge, each four or eight years, to toss out the bad King and replace him with a good King.