A reminder from Hunter S. Thompson about what's really at stake in this (and every) election:

George Bush went out of his way to announce formally that he went to sleep long before the end of the first half [of the Super Bowl].

What kind of all-American boy would say a stupid thing like that while he's running for re-election? Only a fool would deliberately insult the whole Football Nation, at a nervous time when polls show his Job Approval Rating plunging below 50 percent for the first time since he took office in January of 2001. That is like stabbing yourself in the back while you're preparing to fight for your life on a street corner. It is dumb, and so is the dingbat who told Bush to say it.

Ah, nothing like a little perspective. Sure, politics is a fun habit to indulge in. Being a smarty-pants can occasionally cause a warm flush of self-satisfaction. But what really boils the blood is when some pinhead decides to close the bar early, scramble the satellite feed, raise the price of chicken wings, unplug the juke box, & insult your favorite sports star. Send as many cross-eyed, masturbating, meathead goons across the Euphrates as you want, just keep the fuck away from my $1 Pabst-special orgies at the Glug-N'-Fart Saloon. I'm not being facetious. The train fare in Chicago just jumped up $.25. That bullshit man! See, Janet Jackson's "tortured nipple" matters a lot more to me than the profit margin of Halliburton because I live in the real world, not in a made-up monopoly-money world. Okay, the latest issue of The Economist matters more to my sense of civic duty…but not to my dangling, dripping genitals. And it ain't my "civic duty" that's telling me what I'll be doing tonight!