U.S. election making Canadaès seem tedious

Well the battle between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in the U.S. is transformed into a soap opera. We have to be told how exciting it is and as proof that it is so exciting we were treated to two long boring conventions and endless prattle about the family life, ministers, and type of tooth brush that Sarah Palin uses. The parade of attempts to stimulate our interest in the two bogus brand names is so phoney that I am now starting to enjoy creative advertising such as the little baby who makes his first trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Both McCain and Obama stand for change now but U.S. hegemonic foreign policy is shared by both brands and while the public is not looking their government bails out and takes over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sticking the taxpayer with bills in the billions. The cheerleaders for free markets, critics of government intervention, decriers of government inefficiency all stand around cheering. Why not since some of them profited from the sale of these risky mortgages but now the public has to pay the costs. So the change we have in the US is that all those free market pundits and the two main party candidates for president cheer as big bad government bails out part of the capitalist financial system. Talk about moral hazard!
Translating the situation into Freudian terms, some Canadians have penis envy. They envy the bigger pricks running in the U.S. and would rather vote for them.

U.S. election making Canada's seem tedious
Updated Mon. Sep. 8 2008 10:28 AM ET
The Canadian Press
WASHINGTON -- North of the border, it's more of the same - four aging white guys who led their parties in the last Parliament once again making the same old appeals to election-weary Canadian voters.
South of the border, it's the American election of a lifetime, featuring not just an eloquent young senator aiming to be the first black president in U.S. history, but now the youngest woman to make it onto a presidential ticket.
Polls have repeatedly shown that Canadians are riveted by the drama of the U.S. vote. And more than a few of them are suffering election envy.
"I know there's an election in October, but I can't be bothered to learn any more about it, especially when it seems like the prime minister never wants to tell us anything," Tanya Escobar, a Toronto stay-at-home mother, said Sunday of the election call.
"But the American election is hard to tear myself away from. History is in the making no matter which way it goes. It just makes ours seem so meaningless and boring by comparison; just the same old, same old. I'd love it if we had some actual personalities with something to say trying to win the election."
Escobar is not alone. Even those who will be competing with Barack Obama and John McCain for attention admitted they find the U.S. election fascinating.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Sunday that he was enthralled by the American race.
"I've been following it very closely," Harper said on his campaign plane.
When he was asked to make a prediction about its outcome, Harper eschewed the usual hesitation to comment on elections outside Canadian borders.
"I've always said it's the Democrats' to lose .... I still say it's the Democrats in a walk in Congress."
Green party Leader Elizabeth May pleaded with Canadians to stay away from CNN and tune into Canadian coverage of her first election campaign.
"This is happening in Canada, this is happening now," she told supporters in Guelph, Ont.
"I beg you, do not sleep through this election," she urged voters.
Obama, the Democratic candidate, and Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential running mate, are transfixing not just Canadians, but Americans.
From grocery stores to subway trains, in airports and in shopping malls, the country is buzzing about the November election and drawing voter interest in record numbers. The Democrats alone have drastically increased the number of registered voters.
More than 37 million viewers tuned into the Democratic convention in Denver two weeks ago to take in Obama's acceptance speech with its rousing refrain: "American, we cannot turn back."
But the Illinois senator had barely exited the stage at Invesco Field in Denver when McCain stunned both Republicans and Democrats alike by announcing Palin, the governor of Alaska for just two years, would be his running mate, thereby neutralizing one of the strongest weapons in the Republicans' arsenal against Obama - that he lacks experience.
Almost as many viewers watched the Republican convention to take in a spirited Palin address the crowd, and to catch a glimpse of her pregnant 17-year-old daughter, as to take in Republican nominee John McCain's speech.
News, in fact, that Palin's teenaged daughter is expecting a child out of wedlock - despite her mother's firm belief in "abstinence only" sex education in schools - has only added to the frenzy.
As of Sunday, there was a hint of more sordid news ahead for Palin as a former business partner of her husband's failed in his sudden emergency bid to have his divorce records sealed after reporters starting asking questions about the nature of his relationship with the governor.
An elegant, idealistic black man making a serious bid for the White House, an elderly war hero with a storied short fuse doing the same, a teenaged pregnancy, a suggestion of scandal for a self-described "hockey mom" - it all reads like a Joe Klein political page-turner. Back in Canada? Not so much.
"We share media markets and you've certainly got an exciting play going on south of the border, so it's easy to see why Canadians are distracted," David Biette, director of the Canada Institute at Washington's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said Sunday.
"The last election was exciting in Canada, but I guess we can't always have exciting elections. We can probably come up with, roughly, what the outcome is going to be right now. Will there be any real surprises? It doesn't seem so."