...you're an idiot. Stop waiting for the media to give you permission to win the election. Their words don't mean anything, only yours do - except when all you're saying is to talk about them. You're trying to argue with a Hall of Mirrors: The warped images aped from corrupted reality can't hear you, don't know you exist, and couldn't tell the truth even if they did - they're not journalists, and they won't magically become journalists because you treat them as if they were. Turn off the teevee and the Twitter feed, humanoids, and tell me what you're building with your own two hands, your own heart, and your own mind so that a better country will grow from you and those you inspire.
Are you so in love with your own reflection that you can't even look away when it's distorted into a monstrous lie? Are you still the same fly caught in webs of propaganda, self-fulfilling prophecies of helplessness, and contempt for a fiction of "conservative America" that you were under George W. Bush, hanging desperately on every poll to tell you which way is up? Is that how you think this country came into existence and survived all these years - is your behavior and mode of thinking the kind that produces freedom and creative change on an ongoing basis?
Are you America's Last Man, passively absorbing the final shred of living essence as it dissolves into a two-dimensional sheet of mutually-directed malice and fear, whining about the loss of a living past that your sepulchre statue of a present can't comprehend? Do you answer present facts and your own potential for action with imbecilic media cliches, spouting demographic labels and advertising slogans while thinking you're talking? Do you still believe that people wanted to have a beer with George W. Bush? Do you believe that America is a conservative country? When someone claims that white, working-class people are not native soil for Democrats, or that they're perceived as weak on defense, do you just accept that? If so, then accept this too: I don't believe you exist.
Everything else you believe is shit someone hostile to your existence told you to make you inconsequential and waste your time trying to meet their impossible, fiction-based double-standards, so why not believe that too: You don't exist. Everything you say came from somewhere else with little or no intermediate synthesis or additional thought occurring in the process, so why not just accept that you're not actually in the process - you're an arbitrary volume of empty space through which lies and meaningless gibberish pass unimpeded, and are opaque only to real ideas since those might impose the obligation to Be and participate. How much of your poll-head existence is just based on people repeating what they've been told other people believe - exactly like you?
Why even pretend you're a human being if the same Three Card Monte bait-and-switch tactics always jerk you hither and thither without any variation or learning taking place? Just nod your head in solemn resignation when you're told that the world is against you, that your values are an outlier, and everything you hope to achieve is a fantasy. When that gets boring and the media has to get your hopes up to keep playing their reindeer games, nod your head excitedly in ecstatic glee when they tell you it's all going to get better even if you yourself fail to change - you can passively ride the wave of revolution to paradise, just as you were passively riding the wave of corruption to hell.
Keep nodding your head as they tell you you're disappointed with the results, that Americans are impressed in some way with the most recent sociopathic rat nominated by the Republican Party, that the race is tightening up, that it's down to the wire and neck-and-neck, and so on. Like clockwork, every single election cycle, the same headlines with different names cut-and-pasted into the proper locations: And if reality doesn't follow The Plan, then the media gets really angry - whoever the "offending" candidate is who refuses to stop having an overwhelming lead, or who is such a shitbag they refuse to become legitimate, coverage changes into Alternate Universe Mode. Everything the improperly popular one does is wrong, dangerous, embarrassing, flawed, in danger of compromising support with some demographic - everything is Good News for John McCain, all the time. Curing cancer is a disastrous action that risks losing support in people employed by the pharmaceutical industry, etc. etc.
And, of course, conversely, the C.H.U.D. muppet from the GOP who seemingly can't take two steps without kicking a baby in the face has magically discovered the secret of making the base enthusiastic while persuading Americans that they're not evil. We know this because we're told. Over, and over, and over. The grotesque weirdo whose face trickles with the blood of recently-eaten puppies has achieved a "rousing success" by not killing everyone in the audience of his most recent debate performance. Polls prove it. "Which candidate in the debate recently won handily by the American hero debate-winner Mitt Romney and horribly lost by the loser Barack Obama do you think won the debate? Remember, we know where you live, and Mitt Romney is personal friends with your employer. So be honest."
Just keep singing along to the bouncing ball, and chasing the bait on the fishing line in every direction they jerk it. Prepare for the apocalypse when the media's preprogrammed election schedule says it's Good News for John McCain time. When their formulas tell them they need to do something in the other direction, have a public orgasm when they tell you things are going your way, and write superlative-laced rhetoric prominently advertising how the media really knows what it's doing now that they're telling you what you want to hear. Then at the last moment they can say "Oh, so sorry! It was so close! A real photo finish, folks! Thanks for playing, but now our bosses are done with you and will be assuming the offices that are rightfully theirs. Better luck next time!"
Then, of course, you get cynical - because they told you to do that too. Nod your head to "both parties" false equivalency rhetoric belied by their own plainly partisan agenda. Maybe you can then seek alternatives in candidates whose politics only ever serve Republicans. But whatever you do, winning is not an acceptable outcome: In Media Land, it's not even acknowledged as a logical possibility. They can't stop the occasional election victory, of course, but actually accomplishing something can never be part of the agenda. If you do, they'll simply ignore it - and if people know about it anyway, the coverage will hammer them with lies and negative innuendo until the perception of progress is beaten down.
The pundit universe cannot tolerate progress, or enlightenment, or tangible proof of people being empowered to improve their existence: Being good, right, honorable, and intelligent, then behaving accordingly does not yield a profitable narrative. It does not yield exciting commentary, and it does not yield the kind of pointless perpetual contention that feeds the nihilistic vermin who make a career out of noise. Making everything a matter of opinion does. Putting climate change deniers on a panel to rail their insanity as if it were an equivalent position to science feeds them, not reporting on science itself.
No progress is possible in Pundit Land because no resolution can ever be tolerated on even the simplest points - and if you choose to live in Pundit Land, chasing the fantasy that it will ever be inhabited by sane, honest people, then you are gone. Simply gone. You will run in circles hemmorhaging energy and flopping around like a fish on the docks until there's nothing left of you: Nothing but a skittish, pallid little street addict begging passersby for a favorable poll so you can momentarily believe the fake world that has invaded your mind is something tolerable.
There is no excuse for it. At all. The lie was revealed glaringly in 2008. Nothing those bastards claimed about the election had any effect on it - they shrieked "Good News for John McCain" and "Obama in Trouble" from every headline and rooftop, and every banner ad on the internet, and nobody gave the slightest shit. We were too busy living to be caught up in some abstract theoretical interpretation of life, let alone some plainly dishonest attempt to force us into that framework for the convenience of the people who are supposed to be examining it. Rather than us running around in circles trying to get the permission of these con artists to let us shape our own country, we simply acted on our own initiative and let them run in circles trying to mindfuck us into believing they were important.
Unfortunately, the games those people play are not one-sided - there are people who want to live in the Matrix, and want to be enshrouded in a comforting blanket of helpless illusion. They saw exactly what happened in 2008, and it drove them every bit as batshit as the Republicans, just in a completely different and more disturbing way. They were robbed of their certainty of defeat - robbed of the "freedom of the dead" to be utterly inconsequential, and a lot of them have been searching ever since then for chances to get back into that mindset: Excuses to believe that things are worse than they are, that people are worse than they are, that obstacles are insurmountable, and of course the corrupt ideology that citizenship consists of parroting and manipulating narratives rather than working with facts.
These types had a set of cliched phrases and demographic orthodoxy to parrot rather than thinking, and they were very happy with it throughout the '90s and '00s - happy to have politics reduced to a numerical profession in which no real surprises were possible: Any "surprise" that occurred had to just be another brick in the Temple of Bullshit and ultimately serve the media's preprogrammed narratives, because otherwise they would just deny or hound it out of existence (see their reaction to the 2004 presidential campaign of Wesley Clark for an example). Then Barack Obama shattered their world by turning on the lights in a Hall of Mirrors, and suddenly people with any kind of mind recognized immediately what was going on here - that the media really was a corrupted profession full of thoroughly mendacious people who talk to avoid reporting the truth rather than as a means of communication. They shrieked their displeasure at Obama's refusal to play ball in so many ways that it became a running joke that only they seemed not to understand.
But now the usual suspects are at it again, and they have a lot of people pitching in to rebuild the Temple of Bullshit. Turns out some people just plain find security in confinement, and are afraid of living in a world that arises from themselves - they want to be subjects that the world happens to, not the origin of events. Every time the world is handed to them to shape, they get all fidgety and insecure, and start accusing people of not leading - they want to be told what to think, and the moment they are told what to think (even when what they're being told is something that goes against their own alleged agenda), everything snaps into focus for them. "Of course we're doomed," they think - such a belief makes perfect sense to them, and fits their mentality like a key in a lock. Born victims.
In their world, 2008 never happened - for them, the aftermath was a bitter, frightening memory of being alone on a mountaintop with no one telling them where to go or what to do, and an experience best suppressed. Now blissful amnesia has set in among them - they've reverted back to the early 2000s, to the days of making choices based on what the media commands, trying to convince shadows to move in a different direction than the people casting them. They just don't know what to do otherwise. If they didn't have superficialities, they wouldn't have anything at all. And that's why I say to those people, you don't exist. You are shadows. You are fictions. You are ripples created by someone else's stone impacting the water. I will not attempt to persuade you, because there is no one there to persuade: I will simply act and you will follow, because that's what you are. See, the thing is, a footstep doesn't wait to be echoed to have occurred - the only difference is how surprised you are when we arrive.