Find the Pig

I'll give you a hint: He's not wearing lipstick.

This photo illustration is of my own concoction. It's a reaction to the entire electoral process so far since the end of the conventions. Everything seems so preplanned this time around and the electorate seem to be once removed from everything that's going on.

And I don't even know if we should be blaming the candidates. The handlers seem to be coming out and saying the really nasty things, at least on the Republican side. The candidates themselves are spun as commodities; products that we're being marketed, and Palin is a shiny new SUV, just the kind you've always wanted. ICK!

I see the polls each week, like we all do, and I am astounded at how divided this country is. It makes me wonder just how these opinions are being arrived at. What are the questions that are being asked? How do the pollsters arrive at the simplified numbers via their statistical processes? We're remote enough from the process that we have to choose answers like brands of cereal. Then the numbers come out, telling us what we want to have for dinner.

Just like the candidates were chosen long before the conventions, I have a sneaking suspicion that the outcome of the election is sitting in an envelope somewhere in Washington, and the process of voting has become just another formality, like the conventions, to validate a decision that has already been made.

It won't be hanging chads this time around. Now we're going to get faulty tabulations from electronic voting systems, and many of them have no backup to allow hand counting. It's all suspect in my mind.

All I can say is this Palin woman is dangerous. Anyone who's ordered a cafe espresso has more foreign affairs experience than she does. I spent a year involved in government in Alaska back in the '70s, and I can tell you it's no training ground for a president. With just over a half-million people in the entire state, it's really more like a little club where everyone's on a first-name basis. If it weren't for the enormous amount of income from the oil concerns on the North Slope, the state would be another West Virginia populated by disgruntled folk who couldn't take life in the lower 48.

Two months. We've got to wait two months to see the outcome. Two months of sleazy Republican jabs at the Democrats that are so two-faced and self-serving that it's unbelievable the number people who are actually listening to the messages and buying them as sincere and accurate.

Perhaps we should program the presidential election, call it "Americana Idol," and let people vote on their cellphones. Not only would the election be approximately as accurate as the old way, but the charges for all those phone votes would help defray the monstrous debt that Baby Bush has amassed in the last eight years while dangling the boogeyman of terrorism over the heads of the American people.

God, I can't wait until November. The weather will be cooler, too.