Ok to start off with, I didn’t vote.  I have one incredibly stupid reason for not voting that I don’t want to tell you about, and one important reason I didn’t vote.  The important reason I didn’t vote was that I don’t live in a swing state, so the vote I would have cast would have fallen in line with how my state voted anyway.  While my friends already chastised me about it, I refer them to my incredibly stupid and secretive reason for not voting.

Ok so now we have Obama as president.  I will admit that yes, this is historic.  But the degree to which we emphasize that we will have an African-American as a president is sickening.  I’m definately part of a new generation where I look beyond race, however maybe my Dad’s generation sees this as a sort of “Oh wow” kinda moment, but not me.  I feel like if there were such as a thing that is the opposite of racist, if there were some word for it, that’s what I’m feeling too much of right now reading through my feeds.  Also if you voted for him solely because of race, shame on you for not being more informed.  If it turns out his agenda matches though with yours then whatever.

Democrats, as far as this election goes, the one person you have to thank for this victory is George Bush.  He did so terribly these last few years, that in my mind, you could have had a horse on the democratic platform and he would have won.  The fickle nature of America is predictable enough to see that when you’re unhappy with the current party, you’re probably going to go to the other for a bit.

Republicans, what the hell were you thinking?  My news sources are crazy biased for Democrats and from what I’m reading, I feel like your whole campaign was set up to attack Obama as opposed to distance yourself from Bush.  However, there is something to be said for how relatively close the election turned out to be.  Last I looked McCain lost the popular vote by 7 million or so out of 110ish million votes.  For an election where I feel was going to be an easy win for the Democrats you still made it fairly narrow, but again, I think the people in charge went with a poor strategy.  In 4 years I hope campaigning moves away from attacking the other guy and focusing more on issues.  The “landslide” could have been much much worse and even I was thinking it could have been something like 70/30.

The election process in general seems really horrible.  We vote on a Tuesday unless you vote early which is weird.  It should be a national holiday so people in lines aren’t pressured to get back to work.  It should really potentially be on a weekend where you have lots of time and availability to go vote.  And the process should be refined anyway to be a quick in and out affair.  I threw this idea out and a few guildies said it was too prone to fraud, but I don’t think it’s an unsolvable problem.  It would be sweet if you could register to vote.  Then vote online which then has the government send you a paper scantron doodad.  This would take you to the regular voting thing on election day where you just drop it off and it gets scanned and matched with your online vote.  In the age of technology, why we do things so archaically makes no sense to me.  Clearly I know that few people trust voting machines, I’d agree that they shouldn’t be closed source and they should be opened up for inspection. However, please note, that I didn’t vote so I don’t know the process or improvements made over previous years.  Reading about how it happens for other people seems really dumb though to me.

Anyway, now that I think about it, this is probably my first and one of very few political rants.  Unlike all the reddit dudes who claimed doom and gloom if McCain got elected, I’ll be staying in the nation unlike a petulant child.  I think Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s recent statements are taken out of context.  She’s not changing sides all of a sudden but clearly saying that despite differences between parties, the most important thing we do as a nation is galvanize so we don’t look like a bickering married couple.  If anything, the most irritating thing is how divided we are in the terms of if my side is right, then your side is wrong.  Though I know one person who reads this will say I just read reddit too much.  Anyway, I’m done.  I don’t like talking about politics and the next time you see anything like this will probably be in 2012.