I lost it a little in the wake of Tuesday’s elections.  Not too much.  I wasn’t weeping openly or drinking to excess or throwing things around my apartment.  I was wound up, though.  I was incredulous.  I was sad.  I was a little fearful.  And I had people telling me to calm down from all directions.  Relax.  It’s not that big a deal.  It doesn’t really matter. 

On the one hand, they’re right.  The Founding Fathers set up our government with a lot of checks and balances to keep anything from happening too fast so that no crazy factions or individuals could take over too easily.  I know that.

On the other hand, this is important and I’m aghast when I see results that make no sense to me.  One of the pundits on MSNBC – my favorite news source because I’m a commie pinko fag – posed the idea that some of the people who voted Republican simply didn’t believe the crazy that many of these candidates espoused.  I don’t know how you do that.  For years that’s been one of the primary reasons I couldn’t vote GOP.  When they say they don’t think gays are the equal of striaghts, I believe them.  When they say they support personhood, I believe them.  When they say they are willing to take up arms against the government, I believe them.  When they say the Bible trumps the Constitution, I believe them.  Even if I agreed with their economic policies – which I don’t, I would never vote them into office because I don’t want to live in the world they want to create.

I have friends who are fiscal conservatives and relative social liberals who vote Republican.  I think that a private citizen can make that distinction in his or her personal life, but I don’t know how to separate the two in choosing a candidate.  Again, I think the GOP fiscal and social policies are both complete crap, so I don’t have to make that choice, but even if that weren’t the case, I couldn’t vote for only one half of a candidate’s platform because he or she will be legislating on all of it.

This is why I’m not a good debater.  If I bother to argue about something, it’s because it matters to me.  I can’t take a distant, intellectual stance.  If I can, it means I don’t care and then there won’t be an argument in the first place.

This was all brought home to me in a Salon.com piece on Joni Ernst, the pig-castrating new junior Senator from Iowa.  This woman is either spouting a lot of nutty ideas she doesn’t believe in because she thinks Iowans are that far off their rockers or she and a big chunk of the population of Iowa are all that unhinged.  Either way, Iowa elected her and now we all get to share that special bit of crazy she’ll bring to the Senate.  Not just her macro-economic theories.  Everything.

No, she probably won’t bring the government down, but it still bothers me that a state is being represented by a woman who would be happy to take up arms against that government or ignore its laws if her state doesn’t like them.

She said it and I believe her.  I’m funny that way.