The Great Charles Pierce nails it...

[Enigma]

From the great Pierce....(American sportswriter and author)

Amen.

I have no hope for the next 56 days. None whatsoever. Reality's relevance was lost somewhere between Invesco Field and the Xcel Center. We're going to get lofty post-partisan dreariness from both presidential candidates, and a vicious 1992 culture-war brawl under the radar, which will be thoroughly deplored in public by the people who profit from it most. I shouldn't have to watch Karl Rove tell me about the American people and how they vote. I should get to watch Karl Rove being hauled off in chains to Danbury. The major television networks will curl up into a ball roughly five minutes from the start of the first presidential debate. The whole campaign is now going to be conducted on the level of pure mythology. If they had any intellectual honesty whatsoever, the people on TV would dress in white robes and divine the campaign through the movement of waves and the burning of laurel leaves. For a minute back in the spring, it seemed like the country was ready to admit to itself that it poisoned itself with bull***t over the past seven years and was prepared to issue itself a corrective. Not any more. We're back to "personality" and "character" and "narratives" and all the other stuff that keeps anyone from thinking about what's really at stake here.

[Sailor Steve]

Well, you know the country is going to hell in a handbasket, and has been for the last two hundred years, depending on who's doing the telling. He's right, because if my candidate wins the country will be safe and if the other guy wins it will be the end of life as we know it, depending on who's doing the asking. I know exactly what's wrong and I'll tell anybody who'll listen, and no matter who gets elected someone will be there to say "I told you so" and someone will be there to say "Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy". And the media will tell us what is going to happen and what did happen and why it happened and why it didn't happen the way they originally said it was going to happen.

Ain't life grand?

[Platapus]

You two seemed to have summed it up pretty good there.