A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum

I noticed yesterday that my intense interest in the outcome of the Democratic primary had not merely waned but vanished.

Perhaps due to our total technocratic world we are all suffering from attention deficit disorder. Make it march. If you cannot sum it up in the opening paragraph you have to at least made me want to search for your conclusions by reading the next paragraph or listening to the next pundit or catching the next speech.

Sorry but you lost me. This has taken entirely too long. And I don't like the direction it is taking because it seems to be veering back to the same old dirty politics I have come to hate. I was with a few friends last night who I generally like to discuss politics with. They are libertarians and while I don't always agree with them I like their ability to openly discuss the issues with some intelligence (unlike Republicans with their catch phrases). But last night we all did the token sentence or two and moved on to other subjects.

Mud was big. It is spring here in the high country and that means melting snow and lots of mud. Not the slinging kind which seems to still be going on out there in the political world. Oh, speaking of mud, we did discuss Spitzer but because everyone seems to have missed the point and seems to think it is a sex scandal. Everyone seems to have missed that he was committing fraud by setting up dummy accounts to funnel money into so he could pay for those $4,500 per hour sessions.

And we discussed water. That is a really big issue here out west and not a single political candidate for President has addressed it. Seems St. Georges, Utah wants water out of Lake Powell which is getting even lower than it was before because of the amount of water which has to be released to generate electricity for that energy hog Los Angeles. Seems everyone thinks snow levels this year will suddenly make up for four years of drought which brought the lake level to below 1967 when they were filling it. But snow is not that easy. It depends on which side of the mountain it falls. It didn't fall on that side.

On the good news the levels in the Rio Grande will be much higher but we had that declared a wild river and there are no dams on it for Los Angeles and Las Vegas to use to get electricity. And its water is so legislated with compacts and treaties that even if they want to build the pipeline Las Vegas cannot use its water for their fountains.

In short I think there is such a disconnect between the real world out here and politics as usual as to generate a chasm which I don't know that any party or any candidate is going to be able to bridge. Oh, and by the way, I love this definition of insanity: Continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results. There was a point at which I had hope that it was going to be different this year. Wrong. Sorry folks.