Brave Nation Of Half-Literate Blog Commenters

How long has this campaign dragged on? It will be two years old in November, and there's no reason to believe it will stop then.

At this point, it's incredible to consider that some people haven't made up their minds. It's incredible that Hillary is still drunkenly running for president of Earth, that Smooth Barry Obama has won the nomination but has to continue campaigning for it, that a senile old fraud like John McCain is the nominee of any major party, that delusional attention whore Ralph Nader is running again, that an anti-libertarian hack like Bob Barr is the libertarian nominee, and that the libertarian candidate (Ron Paul) is sitting out the race despite amassing a fortune in campaign contributions and a delirious following.

But what's most incredible, to me, as a person who writes about this garbage for a living, is that it doesn't matter at all what I write about, because the comments will be an insane half-literate string of racist nonsense and startling ignorance that has nothing to do with the subject of this post.

Don't even bother reading the rest, just get to the comments and start pasting in your all-caps screaming lunacy. Who are you people? Who gave you people computers? Is this what Al Gore intended when he created the Internet?

The 2000 election was the first to be heavily covered by online media, and the 2004 election was the first to get overwhelming coverage from the political blogs that had sprung up like partisan mushrooms, but the 2008 election will be the first to be completely defined by the angry morons who call C-SPAN, yell idiocy at talk-radio hosts and, especially, leave hundreds of inane comments on websites.

I used to laugh at the people who predict the world will end in 2012. Now, I desperately hope it's true. The only sad thing about the 2012 Doomsday Scenario is that it supposedly won't happen until December of 2012, which means Hillary will be running for president again. But at least there won't be a 2016 election.

When space-monster archaeologists visit the ruins of Earth, they'll find a very detailed record of the 2008 campaign, preserved in the browser cache files on millions of computer hard drives. They will marvel at three-paragraph AP stories posted on CNN that somehow elicit 500 comments that have nothing to do with the story. They will wonder why so many people who can't type, spell or put together a coherent sentence nonetheless composed thousand-word freakouts about things they don't understand. But mostly, the aliens will laugh at the outrageous idiocy that defined America's voters just before the world ended:

* One party's candidate is a Scary Muslim, which is why the pastor of his Christian church is so scary to white people.

* Meanwhile, a lady continues to run for that party's nomination, because her husband was president eight years ago, so she deserves it.

* Poor, uneducated white people who go back and forth between the Democrats and the Republicans and the Reform Party, based on which candidate says the most racist stuff about Blacks and Mexicans, decide that this ultra-liberal elitist Ivy League Wellesley/Yale lawyer who lives in the richest part of New York is, actually, a working-class white-power hero.

* A nasty old jerk, born to an elitist military brass family, spends the last thirty years as a Washington insider, congressman, senator and sellout while living large on the fortune of his beer-heiress second wife. He is somehow, inexplicably, marketed as a "maverick."

* Meanwhile, the people with money and brains are so put off by these old hacks that they go crazy for the handsome young guy for the sole reason that he doesn't make them feel disgusted about politics, because he is sort of new to it.

* As America loses its long-held leadership of the world and the entire U.S. Economy literally dies and the smart money has long since moved to developing countries and wages stagnate and crushing debt hangs over everything and Americans are dumber, fatter, sicker and poorer than anyone in the modern world, the 2008 campaign was basically 24-month-long indictment of the United States as an easily manipulated nation of bigoted half-wits who will, as always, get nothing from whoever wins the White House.

Ken Layne is the editor of Wonkette.