As I was sitting in the student hospital (I swear I have ebola or some motherfucking nasty strain of mono, totally sucks), I noticed a small article in the bottom right corner of the school paper: “Weekly Reader poll predicts victory.”
The jist of the article is that out of the 325,000 students in grades 1-12 whom voted in a mock election, Bush garnered a land slide win of 65%. Say what you will about demographics and random sample sizes, the Weekly Reader poll has predicted each and every victory since the Eisenhower administration. Because most students in this age group tend to simply echo the viewpoints of their parents (I know I did back in the day), the results can be seen essentially as if the parents themselves had voted.
At any rate, I spoke with both Stephan Kinsella and Jeremy Sapienza and mentioned that I thought Bush would emerge “victorious” (no matter who runs in an election, the State always wins). I really don’t have any compelling evidence to support my hunch, but Radley Balko had something of interest I thought would tickle your fancy:
Or maybe Kerry is a blowhard elitist who has the charisma of August roadkill on Texas asphalt.The incumbent has, with a friendly Congress, run up a massive deficit; trampled on civil liberties; taken us to war under false pretenses, with no fall-back plan, and alienated from the world in the process; broken countless campaign promises; run the most secretive administration in history; and after the biggest mass murder in U.S. history, done very little to make us safer.
And your guy is barely tied with him.
Shouldn’t that tell you something?
Now realize, Radley thinks that the two blokes are total schmucks, choads, douches, charlatans and pretty much any other pejorative you could wordsmith, so this is not an endorsement for either gas bag. Still the same, he has a point — how on Zeus’s green earth do you merely stay tied to a nutjob like Bush?
If you have the time, I think you’ll enjoy what the editors at Reason put together for this election.