rustypants speaks

i’m sad to say that ron paul has bowed out of the 2008 presidential election.

folks are still trying to figure him out, but i’ll bottom line it with this:

it’s integrity.

…but it was nice to have the government direct-deposit our economic “stimulus” check this past weekend.

now, who’s going to save the government?

nataliedee.com

ron paul is really the only presidential candidate who intrigues me at this point in the race and while i don’t know a WHOLE lot about him, i know enough to believe i’d support him if he ran independent.

today, that was solidified when i heard that arlo guthrie is supporting paul for president.

and i’ll be damned if the refrain from Alice’s Restaurant isn’t stuck in my fool head now. sheesh.

if my answering machine is any indicator: um, like, YES.

in the last seven days, we’ve had approximately 50 messages left on the machine by everyone from mitt romney, mitt romney’s grandma, mitt romney’s wife, mitt romney’s gardener, and mitt romney’s mistress. and this is just mitt romney. we’ve not even touched on the other candidates who’ve had their obnoxious auto-dialers calling our number.

CNN breaks things down to the ludicrous (included somewhere is probably an explanation why romney’s grandma would be a hit in garnering votes for her precious) for those who give a damn.

bottom line? i can’t WAIT for the primary to be over tomorrow night so we can have our answering machine back.

does the do-not-call registry cover political calls, too? one could only hope.

(i’m still curious about ron paul but won’t commit to anything just yet…)

or pay attention to the polls, or speculate on who might win this or that, or wonder how something might turn out, et cetera, ad nauseum…

society has given so much weight to personal input on the issues that it seems to have clouded the point. i realized when the washington post and the pensacola news journal started allowing “comments” to be made about “news” stories that we were getting silly about this.

the opinionated talking heads have been on fox and cnn for years, but as they are given more and more weight for their ridiculous speculations, the “news” becomes less and less actual news. the “news” is more hype and fanaticism than anything anyone ought to actually care about.

as the presidential election approaches this year, this hyped-up speculatory news is only going to increase. the caucuses have been given way more prominence than they require and to look at the iowa results, we’re OBVIOUSLY a ways away from knowing who is going to end up being the dem / rep nominee.

but that won’t keep the speculators from speculating.

but i will remind folks of this: if you take a look back at prior iowa caucus winners, you’ll find that an iowa win far from guarantees the party nomination.

chill out, eh? primaries run through june. we’ve got 10 months before we have to vote for whatever clowns end up with the nomination. don’t get your panties in a twist just yet.

but all i hear is blah blah blah.

last night’s democratic debate sounds like it was a cartoon: caricatures of real people reading from a memorized script where even seemingly on-the-fly retorts are rehearsed sound bites.

it makes me wonder two things: at the end of the debate, did we really leave knowing anything more about the candidates? and were there dozens of sweet retorts that were left unused because the correct moment didn’t happen as planned?

how’re we to trust these clowns?