I'm back in... Nah wait, I'm out.

For the last few months I've been struggling with whether or not I want to vote for a presidential candidate this time around. Given how meaningless a pro-Obama vote is in both MD and DC, and what a legitimately awful job I think he's done with the presidency, it's really been a tough choice. With no chance of either place going to his opponent, am I going to go out of my way to vote for a guy who rains death on random foreigners and calls them terrorists to put a fig leaf over what really amounts to murder? The guy who didn't give enough of a shit to close Gitmo? The President who squandered a powerful moment and a Congress full of Democrats to give us the weakest, most broke-dicked Health Care Reform bill we could possibly get while still technically being a reform of health care? The dude who loaded his economic advisers with the same turds who brought us the economic crisis in the first place? Labor, Medicare, human rights in foreign policy... he's sidelined them all, if not actually betrayed them.

But then Akin runs off his mouth and Romney chooses Ryan, and the whole thing actually takes on a semblence of meaning again. I mean, if Obama is 99% crap, Team R&R seems to have pulled out all the stops and made it a round 100%. Neither of them are remotely acceptable candidates, but that 1% makes a difference, right? Maybe?

But then the DNC comes through and the party platform makes some stupid people on Fox angry and instead of laughing them off, or actually going to the people to see whether or not they support the platform as is, they pull off an astonishingly blatant display of exactly how meaningless American politics really is. Check this out:

It really instantly refocused the issues for me, unapologetically showing off how little participation seems to matter. Actually go all the way down to the convention and loudly shout no to proposed changes, and the guy will just keep asking until he thinks he can hear enough people saying yes for him to continue on with his scripted statements. Show up in the polls and vote for someone who will exit out of Campaign Mode and go into Incumbent Mode, where he'll do what he and his rich buddies want, and ignores you the same way the naysayers were ignored at the convention- not even really considered, not really a part of the script.

Right now the Republicans still have two months to do something sufficiently horrific for me to take this all back and actually take the time to go in and cast a meaningless vote for a guy dead-set on spending most of his time doing things I don't like, so... at least there's that?