So, you've probably seen in the conventional news that the Presidential election is incredibly, painfully close, with one state's electoral votes making the whole difference for the free world. You probably bought a newspaper to get more information, and you're probably watching news shows more, and buying their sponsor's products. That's because you're a total sucker.

Fact is, Bush won over 350 electoral votes, mostly in a landslide, but CNN called up the rest of the news stations and told them they'd all win out if they agreed to report the news in a much more exciting manner. So, instead of the clean, simple vote that actually occurred, we're hearing this hyped-up, it- will-take-weeks version of the story.

It's no big surprise. Sports radio announcers used to do it all the time; long after the baseball game was over, they'd fake a much more exciting sequence of events that would end up, at the end of it, with the same score as the real game, but with a lot more drama.

And so, we're getting the same thing. We're flooded with last-minute-to- midnight images of little old ladies in Florida getting the ballots wrong, voting booths closed and reopened and closed again in Missouri, quirky Gore congratulations-retraction phone calls, press errors, and so on.

The same day in the news, just to let us know that they're making it up, we're informed that a man in San Francisco was arrested for biting his dog. Man bites the dog. The old journalism hack phrase.

Actually, Al Gore dropped out of the race two weeks ago so that he wouldn't be a spoiler candidate to Nader. Nader was then thrown into a bear-fighting pit by Cheney's stormtroopers. No one would run the story, so we still have the fiction of a Gore-Bush race.

But I call bullshit on that. The story of the 2000 Presidential Election is actually the most boring election story ever, and they're just reporting it the way that will sell the most diapers.

Admit. You don't give a shit about the functioning of this country. If you did, you would have written a letter to your congresspeople at some point this year, but you didn't, did you? You're just following the story because it's just like the movies.

WELL, YOU'RE MAN NUMBER THREE, FUCKO! PUT THEM APPLES IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT!

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yungstud@pigdog.org