Hello, Lamppost

Well, it's been too long an absence, so we came back for a post-election post rife with HIGHpocrisy.  There's something about elections that brings out the idiocracy, not democracy; the stupidity, not lucidity.TM
Let's just hit a few of the lowlights right off the bat:
CO - votes down a personhood bill, but elects a guy who wants one on the Federal level
KY - anti-incumbent fever re-elects Yertle the Turtle, thereby potentially taking health care coverage away from the very people who need it the most. (AR, WV, what are you looking at?)
FL - whitest of the white-collar criminals beats back challenge from tanned fan-loving mish-mash of a governor.
WI - anti-labor, white-collar criminal wanna-be wins AGAIN! And now he might want to put as much white back in the White House as possible. [This from a state that dumped Russ Feingold, so we're not too surprised.]
KS - ruin a state, keep your job.
IA - warm-blooded Sarah Palin knock-off?  Sure, go ahead, can't have enough of those running around the Senate.
And the list goes on and on. Everywhere there was a chance for voters to put their political speech (read: $$) where their mouth is, guess what happened? Against their own damn interests. Every. single. time!  It's truly amazing how moronic the average American voter can be. Economy on the mend, and always the #1 issue - yet people punish the party that had stewardship in favor of the one that tried to wreck the economy in the first place.
Progressive issues won (hello, Mary Jane, hello minimum wage hike); fair-to-moderate candidates did not. Why?  Was it just about the numbers? Historically, if Dems turn out, they win.  Last night was an historically low turnout.  The people who had every reason to vote, didn't. Of course, the system is broken! It has been for some time.
Was it about hatred of the other (black President, brown immigrant, blood-red Ebola)?  As our good friend* Taylor Swift sings, "haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate".
Was it the media's fault?  Sure, we can lay much of the blame on the sheep, but let's save a small dose of scorn to heap on a glassy-eyed, horse-race only media, not just for a collective laziness, but really for an outright abdication of the role of the Fourth Estate. It would have helped if the bug-nuts would have been called out for their bug-nuttery.
Maybe we shouldn't bother trying to come up with impossible answers to unsolvable problems. A minority of Americans (as opposed to minorities, generally) who are too dumb and frightened to know better, just voted in a Congress that will prove crazier and less productive than the one that already reached record-low approval ratings. Hey, if they can't be bothered to vote for people who might actually want to help make their lives a little better, then the hell with them, right? WRONG! Because real people suffer real consequences.  It's not OK that we all get dragged down into hell together.
* disclaimer: we are not actually friends with T-Swift, though we could be, if she let us!