Have you ever wandered around your neighborhood after an election and thought to yourself, “I wish I had some use for all these leftover campaign signs.”

Well I don’t. I just pull ‘em out of the ground and stick ‘em on my neighbor’s lawn:

Please! Knock on my neighbor’s door at midnight to vote!

A south-facing view of their yard.

My, oh my! A fellow Libertarian? Well land sakes! Because you know that Barr-Root sign sure as hell wasn’t leftover from my yard.

…and one to grow on!

I must admit that I’m a little fearful of going to sleep tonight.

And it only took me one hour, six minutes and a bottle of two buck chuck to diagnose myself.

I would, however, like to leave off with this sentiment, immortalized in a cotton-polyester blend and on sale for the equivalent of my home’s value now that the kids on Wall Street have stopped playing rock, paper, scissors with the assholes in the mortgage industry:

Also, I would like, if I may, add to the f-list:

- everyone who currently works on, is affiliated with or has ever laid eyes on Wall Street

- McCain

- Obama

-  pro-war zealots

- anti-war protestors

- the recession or depression or whatever the cool kids are calling it these days

-  polling organizations

- socialized anything

- CNN

- MSNBC

- Fox News

- Nancy Grace

- AIG

- that creepy dude who does the Price-Waterhouse commercials

- the Nikkei

- global warming

- atheists

- evangelical christians

- the makers of string cheese

-  vegans

- people from Finland

- Brett Favre

What’s on your f-list?

Actually, I did not so much discuss politics as allowed myself to be drawn into a rather pointless and stupid political temper tantrum thrown by a classmate who has made a habit of painting all conservatives with the broad brush of bigotry.

For the sake of disclosure I believe it only fair to assert here that I genuinely like this classmate of mine. He’s a funny, witty and rather charming gentleman with a sparkling personality that I have enjoyed for the last couple of semesters.

It’s just that he’s also completely irrational, politically speaking.

You see, I identify myself as a conservative in the more classic sense that I believe the government that governs best governs least. For example, you want to smoke weed, shoot heroin, snort coke? Knock yourself out. Just don’t ask me to fork over cash to for the government to blow on healthcare or wiretapping. I’ll vote no on Proposition 8 and then turn around and fight efforts to nationalize our banking, healthcare and oil industries. I support Bob Barr, read Ayn Rand and aspire to be the female John Mackey.

So there I was last night, standing around all innocent-like when my classmate threw down the “all conservatives are homophobic bigots” gauntlet.

Consider my eyebrow raised.

Now, as a lifelong resident of California I’ve become accustomed to being compared to Hitler, called names that would make a trucker blush and accusations of being on the wrong side of various and sundry -isms for no more substantial a reason than not being liberal. In other words, living peaceably in California often involves me ignoring the shallow bumper sticker philosophies of certain individuals who believe that only registered Democrats hold a monopoly on virtue and compassion.

In fact, I have become so accustomed to this political environment that I have perfected a rather fun – if expensive – coping mechanism called “Let’s get together and blow $250 in Costco’s liquor aisle!”

Anyway. I don’t know what happened to me last night. Maybe I need to increase my zoloft intake or perhaps this election season has simply gone on too long but yesterday my frayed nerves finally snapped with an audible “ploink!” and instead of doing my usual thing and ignoring the ad hominem attack by my classmate I leapt into the rather large puddle of conversational dung with both feet and engaged him in what had to have been the single dumbest political discussion ever in the history of humankind. In fact, the discussion was so dumb that I was forced to use a run-on sentence right there to convey it’s dumbness.

At any rate, while I stood there arguing into the wind I was reminded of an e-mail sent to me by a fellow Libertarian who had relocated from San Francisco to El Dorado Hills for work. When I asked him how he was liking his new digs away from the knee-jerk histrionics of the bay area he replied, “I feel like I’ve traded one political hell for another. I moved from brainless knee-jerk liberalism to brainless knee-jerk conservatism. Sometimes my inner Howard Roark makes peeps and everyone stares at me like I’ve suggested eating babies for breakfast.”

Some days it just doesn’t pay to be a Libertarian.

I usually beg off the question by claiming that - as a registered Libertarian – I never have a dog in the fight but really it’s because I’m congenitally incapable of taking the douchebags in either of the major parties seriously.

Take the Democrats for instance. Here’s a party filled with people who are dedicated to the notion that our government – an organization that, if it were a person, couldn’t find its ass with both hands and a flashlight – hasn’t fucked things up enough. No, they want to expand the reach of government despite a growing body of evidence that government intervention really only cultivates helplessness. They also want to put our government in charge of the care and feeding of every American citizen who looks the least bit perplexed in the face of the rigors of adulthood. And they want the rest of us to pay for it.

Then there are the Republicans. Now there’s a group of people who can’t seem to shed their civil liberties fast enough. I mean holy crap people, the ink on The Patriot Act wasn’t even dry before your were crawling into bed and asking the FBI to read you a bedtime story – which they’ll get around to just as soon as they’re done rooting through your financial records and looting your stash of internet porn.

Side note: If I were a betting woman I would put a thousand bucks on the fact that somewhere deep in the bowels of the Republican Headquarters there is a shrine to the director of Homeland Security that says “Freedom and liberty were overrated anyway.”

Then there are the candidates themselves, whose sole purpose – so far as I can tell – is to avoid saying anything on the campaign trail that might be interpretted as the least bit substantive. Yesterday I was talking to an acquaintance of mine when she divulged that a particularly stirring speech by her flavor of candidate had her “on the chair clapping and crying.”  

“I just felt so good. Someone running for president has never made me feel so good.” She said.

Well good for you. That’s really fucking fabulous news, especially for your candidate because so long as voters are feeling really good they certainly aren’t thinking very hard. And really, when you get down to it, winning elections is so much easier when your supporters allow themselves to be led around by their emotions instead of engaging in all that pesky critical thinking.

Which is why candidates get away with stumping around promising things that they have no right to promise and are legally incapable of delivering anyway. Not that this has ever stopped voters from believing; the most rabid of both candidates’ camps really do seem to think that Barack Obama is Santa Claus and John McCain can shoot rainbows out of his ass.

Side-side note: Wouldn’t it be nice though, if both candidates would simply stand at their respective podiums and shout ”I like puppies and rainbows! And I’ll give out free candy if I become President! Also! I can fly if I flap my arms real fast!” I mean, that would most certainly be less insulting to my intelligence than the typical election year tripe being regurgitated now.

Anyway. That’s why I don’t write about politics.

Still. There are times, like today, when it seems more than a little surreal that the events of a morning seven years ago led to my dad being deployed to Afghanistan. Where he has been for months, is right now and will be for some time to come.

Talk about the personal being the political.

My daughter riding on the shoulders of her Papa Sarge. 

My dad walking to his aircraft on the way out. All my readers from military families are probably very familiar with this vantage point of their loved one.

CH-47 helicopters taxi and prepare for departure to Afghanistan.

This is kind of like that only without the humorous component. My husband and I watched The Kingdom last night and while the movie itself earned a modest “pretty good” rating in our estimation, the intro is probably the most impressive summary of the history between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that I’ve ever seen.

Granted, this bit doesn’t touch on the pursuit of bin Laden through the nineties or even mention the Saudi royal family’s double-crossing policy of openly allying themselves with the United States while simultaneously funding Wahhab “charities” who are but a thin veil used to funnel cash and weapons to groups whose singular intention is to destroy the West, but it’s a four minute bit; it would be a tad unreasonable to expect anything more comprehensive.

Anyway, check it the clip out. I promise you it will be the best 3:50 minutes you spend on the web today:

99% of all political bloggers are knee-jerk histrionics who have given as much critical consideration to their political ideals as the average person uses to select toilet paper.

As if the first one weren’t enough, I have a second theory about political bloggers:

Most of your Pavlovian political zealots – the ones who salivate at the mere mention of Hillary or Dubya - don’t give a wit about the political ideals that they claim to care so much about. Rather, the blogosphere seems to have attracted the latest generation of drama queens who have masked their need to be the properly outraged center of attention in the guise of being “principled”.

Translation for those of you who don’t speak Stephanese: most political bloggers act like hormonal fourteen-year-old girls on the hunt for something to cry over.

To be sure, there are definitely a few gems out there:

- MW of DWSUWF is dedicated political blogger with whom I disagree on many points but who has – quite admirably in this environment - managed to keep a dispassionate and intelligent blog that is a joy to read.

- Another blogger whose political posting consists mainly of where the political meets the personal is James, who has a set large enough to regularly engage his readers in conversations about topics that make most people do that creepy rocking back-and-forth thing while holding their knees to their chest and sucking their thumb.

- Kevin and Kyle are two fellow Catholics who consistently post through the minefields of politics and faith with respect and class and – if I were them – are justifiably annoyed about now that their track record of taste and virtue has now been marred by an affiliation with this blog.

…and despite the fact that I’m forgetting a couple, my quest for intelligent life in the realm of political blogging has been a frustrating experience indeed.

Just for once I’d like to read a post by a liberal who concedes that an immigration free-for-all is a disastrous idea that encourages the cruel exploitation of people who enter this country without the benefit of being documented workers with requisite rights as human beings.

Similarly, I would do backflips if I could find a conservative who would concede that the human flow from Mexico consists mainly of folks who bust their ass doing jobs that we’ve become too silly and full of ourselves to dirty our hands with and not – as some would have you believe – seething hordes of brown people intent on bankrupting our welfare system.

I’d love to hear a rational and constitutionally sound argument devoid of ad hominem appeal supporting a continued ban on gay marriage.

(That last part was a joke because a constitutionally sound argument supporting a continued ban on gay marriage does not exist.)

I’d like, before I die, to hear my fellow Christians acknowledge the benefits afforded us by secular government.

I would positively faint if I ever heard an atheist admit that the U.S. is hardly a theocracy.

It would be nice if for once a political blogger could form an original thought instead of relying on jackass idealogues like Ann Coulter or Al Franken to do it for them.

On a personal note, I would really appreciate it if in the course of a political discussion people would use logic to argue with me based on the points I’ve made instead of a) throwing up their hands and invoking my home state as evidence that I’m some pinko-commie nutjob or b) using my Central Valley digs as proof that I’m some right wing extremist who’s only a small cache of weapons away from being the next Randy Weaver.

I’d also like for everyone I know in both the real and virtual worlds to conference and decide once and for all whether they’re going to brand me a conservative or a liberal because I’m sick of receiving political e-mail forwards and if there is any way to cut that crap in half I’d be mighty obliged.