O.K., yeah, I’ve been back for several days now. You were expecting something interesting, were you? How very predictable.

I have seen the same reaction from several other bloggers, in that it is really hard to figure out just where to start.

First off, I would like to congratulate the Democratic party for figuring out a way to do the impossible; throw what looked like a sure fire win in November of 2008 for the Dems into a probable victory for the Republicans. Who would have thought it possible that the Democrats would have two, count ‘em, two firsts in the same election? A woman and a black man running for President of the United States. Simultaneously. Either of which would have, at any other time, just run away and hid from any and all Democratic and Republican challengers. And, lo and behold, their supporters seem quite willing to fracture the Democratic Party into pieces before letting the rival Democrat win! How bizarre and unlikely is that one? And one of the Democratic candidates continues to say nice things about the Republican nominee and continues to do everything in her power to undermine her Democratic opponent, even though it is close to impossible for her to win the nomination without resorting to deviousness and outright hackery. After eight years of George W. Bush, who would have guessed that one? Not me!

This will be so great. At least four more years of a Republican president who knows nothing except how to give orders to the military, and who is apparently as without a clue as George Bush has been. And the press still seems to prefer the Republican! After all that is happened, the Republican gets a pass and the Dems get all their faults played to the max in front of a national audience. And many in the press actually admit that this is happening!

I thought I couldn’t be surprised anymore after the elections of 2000 and 2004. This has got to take the cake. We have a president who is mired in incredibly low approval numbers for an incredibly long period of time, and his would-be successor from the Republican party wants to continue doing just what has been going on for the last eight years, which should be obvious to anyone higher on the intellectual scale than a rutabaga that it isn’t working. At one time, they looked to be mortal enemies, and McCain was actually considering leaving the Republican party. Yet, here he is, poised to win the presidency under the banner of four more years of the same exact thing! How absolutely astounding is this?

We are just caught in an avalanche of bad news; so bad that we can’t even begin to single out individual stories of badness anymore. It is a tsunami of badness out there, and we are all in danger of getting swept out to sea. Political, economic, energy, the environment, the war…. It’s all bad. And yet, to listen to the pundits, you might think that the biggest crisis facing this country is some angry black preacher from Detroit.