tuesday night cannot come quick enough

The election is tomorrow.  The polls close by mid-evening in just about all states.  

I cannot wait.

By about nine o'clock tomorrow, it may possibly be safe to turn on my television again, as long as I do not accidentally turn the dial to the fox cheerleading network.

I was watching the evening news last night. In the middle of reporting the mayhem of the day, they took a commercial break and went to the other mayhem. Five commercials came on. Each was a political ad, one of them repeated within the sequence. Each blasted the adversary, claiming in no particular order that he/she was in favor of higher taxes, illegal immigrants coming to the good old USA for no other reason than to kill us all, killing jobs to the point of eliminating any hope of working again, and causing traffic jams. None of the ads, if one thought about it, had any ring of truth to them at all.

None. Well maybe the one about traffic jams did.

None of the ads made a single mention of why we should vote for that candidate on the candidate's merits, rather than why we should not vote for his/her opponent.

None. Not a single one.

Throughout the evening, as commercial breaks arrived at the various stations we watched, the process repeated itself. Not a single political ad came on touting the merits of the candidate and what the candidate stood for rather than why we should not vote for the other guy, usually aired in hysterical fashion, with ominous music playing in the background and a photo of the adversary in the most unflattering light, facial expression or pose they could possibly have found short of a photo of the candidate naked with barnyard animals.

We did not even get the standard candidate's spouse stands in front of the camera and tells us what a wonderful guy/gal he/she is married to, and how he will be just as wonderful for you, ending with the family, including their parents, grandparents and 2.4 children, posing in front of the ancestral palace that has housed eighteen generations of Smiths, all of whom were mayor of Padookatown, Nowhere, USA going back to the Mayflower.

Don't you long for the day, if it ever really existed, when candidates told us what they actually stood for and what they actually intended to do in office? And not simply in generic, meaningless terms?

So the question is now posed:

Of the candidates who are running for office this time whom you plan to vote for, can you say why you are voting for that candidate, as opposed to why you are not voting for the other guy? I bet most of you, aside from the usual drivel we hear from Washington, or our state and local capitals, cannot really and truly say why you are voting for any one particular candidate instead of why you are not voting for the other guy.

And that is what is wrong with us.