I’d like to start out by saying that I normally like to at least try and follow politics and current events, as part of being a semi-informed citizen and all of that. But with two weeks left before everyone (by which I mean 35 percent of non-felon citizens over age 18 or whatever) goes off to vote, I’ve reached my limit, I have to say:

I want this election to be over.

Yes, I still have a candidate whom I’d like to see win. But after months and months of idiot pundits twisting every word from each candidate (by which I really mean both candidates because nobody bothers with third parties, right?) in all kinds of unintended manners, after useless poll quoting and number crunching and zoom-in maps by district where you can tell that white males over 60 who didn’t graduate from college might be slightly leaning one way or another, I am about ready to vomit the collective nonsense of flag pins and hypothetical plumbing businesses and Maverick-raps and pregnant daughters and secret Muslim-phobia and Jews for Jesus and Alaskan Secessionists and William Ayers and who knows what else right back over the media sources it’s all coming from.

But blaming the media is far too easy. Because they wouldn’t be focusing on this if people didn’t buy into it.

With the only real forum to compare actual policy being debates where you can basically say whatever you want, since they don’t fact-check until later, we find ourselves focusing more on the persona of a candidate than what they actually believe.

With such an immense lack of substantive focus, it’s easy to feel that we at Uni won’t be the only ones participating in a mock election.

Unfortunately, I can’t say I can think of an easy solution to all of this. Maybe we should turn off the pundits … at least the screaming ones. I have to admit I like the ones on PBS, though, but that’s because they’re calm and occasionally come up with points I hadn’t thought of or heard blared 23,780,234,823,478,234,789,234,789 times, at the same number of decibels, for hours on end at FOX News or MSNBC.

Wait, I just wrote a whole blog entry about this stupid election. That was the exact opposite of my point. Why isn’t this over yet?!!? I am just going to stop watching TV and going online for the next two weeks. I don’t think I can bear this anymore.