Election blahs

With elections coming up both north and south of the border, I am finding great difficulty drumming up enthusiasm for either contest. Amba is even worse off:

I'm so disgusted all around that I'm teetering on that "UNDECIDED: whether to vote or not" precipice these days. Each campaign keeps going to extremes that drive me toward the other. Right now I'm feeling that the Republicans don't deserve to be rewarded for this kind of anything-goes campaigning. Yesterday it was Obama supporters' clueless arrogance that was driving me towards McCain.

It is rather a sad thing when you have to vote for whomever disgusts you least. Do all the nasty, sneering partisans not realize that they are driving undecideds further away?

Granted, the Americans have the disease of nasty partisanship worse than we do. Perhaps that is one of the inherent failings of a two-party system: it is so much easier to become polarized.

Still, there are plenty of Canadians who are afflicted also. Some of them, unfortunately, work for political parties. I suspect the puffin incident will blow over rather quickly, seeing as it was so quickly disowned by the Conservatives. People who are too young to remember kitten-eating aliens and the Charest Conservatives' attack ads sneering at Chrétien's facial paralysis and how disastrously they back-fired should not be put in charge of websites unsupervised.

I personally am trying to ignore political advertising as much as humanly possible. No one party excites me. Unlike Amba, I am not going to fall off a cliff. As a moderate, the smaller parties are unlikely to get my vote. Of the two major parties, neither one excites my admiration. But one has dug a larger hole in my esteem over the years than the other, so for this election, I'm probably going to vote for the one with the shallower hole. Not very inspiring, but a girl has to decide somehow.

If anybody can cite me reasons why either the Liberals or Conservatives deserve some admiration, I am willing to listen. I can think of a couple of things myself, but they neither one has enough positives to turn those holes into hills.

And if anybody wants to put a good word in for one side or another in the American race, feel free too. The operative term is "good word". I am sick to death of sneers and mud-slinging.

(Yes, I know my recent post about Jack Layton had a bit of a sneer to it. But just a bit. That level of political cluelessness is hard to ignore.)

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