First of all, a note.  This is going to be the last purely political post I'm making here.  I've decided I might be more motivated if instead I focus exclusively on pop culture stuff.  For one thing, there are not that many right of center bloggers who comment on pop culture and many of the ones who do, IMO, don't really get it.  Getting it is important now because for better or worse, our society is led nosewise by the popular culture.

Now on to my post.  If you're anything like me, you're lamenting how this election season promises to be the worst since 1976, when America had the Sophie's Choice between Gerald "there's no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" Ford and Jimmy "Malaise" Carter.  We know what kind of deal we got out of that election, don't we? 

As it stands, we will choose between a Marxist from the Democratic party sworn to tax the bejeebers out of us, take away our Second Amendment rights, expand the role of an ever increasingly intrusive government, put a bunch of Ruth Bader Ginsburg clones in the federal courts, cut and run out of Iraq and possible Afghanistan as well, eviscerate our military, and keep our borders flung wide open...and possibly a D.C. establishment Republican who will do most of what I've already mentioned.  He'd put a bunch of David Souter clones on the benches, but is there really much of a difference? 

Worse yet, the two Democratic frontrunners have connections to megalomaniacal commie billionaire George Soros...as does the possible GOP nominee.  Imagine that...no matter who wins, Soros wins.  Eeek!

So how did we end up at this point?  For one thing, conservatives didn't have the right standard bearer.  Bush left no successor.  The Democrats and media picked off promising stars like George Allen and Rick Santorum before election season got rolling.  The amounts of money needed to run a campaign allowed mostly the super-rich or the highly-connected to get in, neither of which are known to be terribly conservative.  Fred Thompson got in too late and ran a terrible campaign.  Nobody knew who the hell Duncan Hunter was.  Tom Tancredo was written off as a one-note candidate and disdained by the pro-open borders GOP establishment.  And that left us our current crop of contenders.

But there's another problem.  You see, for 27 years the moderate-to-liberal Checker Pants crowd put up with us conservatives because they knew the GOP needed us to win elections.  Secretly, they never liked us.  We're too pious, too distrustful of government and institutions.  We made them look like geeks on the D.C. cocktail circuit.  Left to their own devices, they legislated and governed as Diet Democrats.  Around election time, they'd go back to telling us what we wanted to hear and reminding us that their opponents were the worse alternative.  For the most part, they were right.

Now, however, they think they don't need us anymore.  If John McCain is the nominee, they think more moderate to conservative Democrats and Independents will crossover to vote for him, making up for conservatives who decide to sit out the election or vote third party.  I think they're wrong; the media is setting up a pig in a poke for the McCain campaign.  But they love the idea of being able to win elections without those Bible thumpers, small government libertarians, crazy right-to-lifers, uppity talk show hosts and pundits, and unsophisticated gun freaks.

Unfortunately, there's no conservative King Arthur waiting in the wings to rescue us in 2012 or 2016.  At least not one I can see.  By then, when America has turned into Canusixco and most of the electorate is addicted to the crack of entitlements, will it make any difference?

     New Hampshire just showed the world two things:  1)  Hillary Clinton is just like a horror movie villain...just as everybody thinks he's dead, he reaches up and snatches your ankle.  2)  the media is desperately trying to write the results before the voters have their say, ergo the egg all over the faces of those predicting the Hildebeast's demise. 

     The media however was successful in hyping Mike Huckabee's and John McCain's candidacies to victories in Iowa and New Hampshire.  It played a big part in helping B. Hussein Obama's victory in Iowa as well.  This was after it decided he was a hunkier leading man than Cacklin' Hillary.

     The end result is that there is no clear frontrunner for either party.  I still think Hillary will in the end pull it off for the Democrats, but it's murkier on the Republican side.  The obsession with focus groups, pre-voting polls, entrance polls, exit polls, and endless jibjabbery on t.v. is creating a faux reality that has little to do with what voters are really concerned about or who they really support.  Republican voters, particularly conservatives, don't really trust the media in the first place, so they're not all banding around one or even two guys yet.   The Fredheads are hanging in there as are the Duncan Hunter supporters, and we'll not even get into the Paulistas.  As someone who has been leaning towards Romney for a while, I resent the frequent drumbeat of the punditry that he needs to win NOW or he's toast even though I don't get to vote in my state's primary until Februrary.  That's 22 states on the same day, people.   Let me make the decision, not you guys.

     The MSM and its polling handmaidens have been making more and more errors in trying to play Miss Cleo with the election process.  They listen to what the echo chamber is saying and that produces embarrassing results from the networks calling Florida prematurely in 2000 to early claims based on exit polling (as polls were still open) that it was going to be a blowout for Kerry in 2004 to the Comeback Girl's win in New Hampshire last night.  I'm fed up with the second-guessing and the blatant engineering based on who the MSM likes now and who (at least among the GOP) is likely to easy pickins in the general election.

     After all, we the people are supposed to be in the voting booth, not the media.