For me, there are few events more enjoyable and looked forward to than an election season. It’s sad, I know and I should probably be hospitalized. I’m like a crack addict or a heroin junkie. An absurd likeness of me should be getting arrested on COPS right now. A lanky, long-haired and (by uniform code) shirtless doppelganger should be getting chased down by police in Arizona. When I’m unruly, the will beat the hell out of me and I will deserve it. My NASCAR-endorsed Blackberry falling to the ground from my battered hand as the MSN news ticker scrolls by unread.

Sadly, my only beatings will be for cash – doled out with the cold, machine-like precision of Sindee, the nasty-looking hooker with big hands.

Now, a quick glance to the margin will show that my boredom-spree originates in Canada. So you would have to be from somewhere else to think that I’m talking about a Canadian election. Anyone from Canada will tell you that our elections occur in a tight six-week envelope, coming and going will all the ceremony of grass through a goose. They are interesting in the same way as an amicable divorce. If you’re really lucky the whole process will produce a legislative mess only slightly less unnerving than its immediate predecessor. Until recently in Canada, our political spectrum has been quite narrow – sitting like an ugly date on the left-of-center fence. Now, we have a slightly conservative party who we all try and make seem menacing like strict, angry Republicans. We do so at our own peril, as the former leader of that party arrived at one press conference on a jet-ski.

Now imagine Republican master-strategist and perennial dough-boy Karl “the Architect” Rove doing that.

But like many – if not most Canadians with political curiosity – my gaze turns south to the United States of America. The reason for this is simple; the American political season lasts for a period exactly three days less than a full Presidential term. Even now, with the 2005 Inauguration less than a month behind us, several important political organizations are positioning themselves for the hotly contested presidential contest of 2008.

Fox News and CNN top the list. I also hear that the Democratic National Committee gave doctor-turned-governor-turned-shrieker Howard Dean a job doing something around the office – but who cares about that?

I’d have mentioned MSNBC here but they have so few viewers that when they do an opinion poll, the total number of respondents only adds up to 45%.

Fox has already done several hard hitting stories laden with questionable bits of information (Freedom Facts) to the extent that Hillary Clinton is a bitch. CNN, who you know you can depend on because their motto says so, has done some similar stories. Because they are not fair and balanced, they will only report that about half the nation thinks that Hillary is an evil harpy. Both of these luminary networks also do stories on Mayor of the Universe, Rudy Guliani or Senate Action Hero John McCain running for the Republican ticket.

This takes up a lot of their time, and it gives Wolf Blitzer a reason to live (a dubious enterprise at best…).

What gets lost in this is that the chances of any of these three getting their party’s nomination in 2008 is roughly equal to the probability that the late Johnny Carson will be reborn from his crematorium ashes to be a guest Judge on American Idol.

The point of all this – since I just discovered that I don’t have one – is that this is what we tune in for. I don’t know the word for it, but its not news – its certainly not journalism and it may not even be information. If I wanted that I could go online to Reuters, the AP or the BBC. Hell, I could even turn on the TV and watch the CBC.

Well I could…

Canadian news is largely bereft of this, probably has something to do with not needing our own hyperactive media culture since we get to borrow the much larger one directly below us. Consequently, we have calm quiet broadcast punctuated by moments of over orchestrated conflict where two political pundits will politely agree to disagree. Once, one of them leaned forward and pointed. Really. I also have to assume that most of these people were one-time print journalists because, Jesus they are a homely lot.

So we are left with the tragically unoriginal notion of the Vast Wasteland of American Television – a broad and unforgiving landscape where hot chicks (but serious looking) read the news in 2-minute bursts and nothing is so salacious as that which only might have happened. It says something about the consumers of this culture when we turn to journalists for soothsaying and prophesy.

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