Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not politics, I am as clanging brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophesy, and understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could move mountains, and have not politics? I am nothing. And though I bestow all my own goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not politics? It actually changes nothing. Politics is patient, and is helpful; politics is not personal, is something professionals know not to take too personally, not to have grudges over; rejoices not in ideological purity, but rejoices in practical solutions; supports all things, believes in the people, hopes for a better world, endures anything. Politics never fails: but whether there be prophesies, they will fail; whether there shall be spin, they shall run out of things to say; whether there be trivia, it shall fail. For we prophesy unsuccessfully, and we spin to an audience that knows our tricks by now, but when that which actually solves problems and gets things done shows up, trivial distractions pass away. For trivia is trivial, and prophesies get even the most elementary things wrong, but when the rubber hits the road, trivia and prophesies are done away with. When I was a child, I ranted like a child, I understood no more of how the world actually works than a child does, and I had a childish faith in ideology: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see the world as through a dirty window, but in the future, we'll see the evidence face to face; now we know a little, but then we'll know every bit as much about the actors as they know about us. And now abideth economics, history, and politics, these three: but the greatest of these is politics.

No, really, that's more or less how I think. OK, what's really going on above is that I was thinking about something way out of character for me, namely the fact that I am actually falling asleep at my desk while trying to watch the evening's political news coverage, night after night, for almost two weeks, to the point where it's randomizing my sleep schedule. And that's very, very weird for me, because there are three lenses that I use to look at almost the entire world: history, economics, and politics. That's how the parody of First Corinthians chapter 13, above, began, with the realization for me there "abides three things, economics, history, and politics, but the greatest of these is politics," and having put it that way, I couldn't resist completing the parallelism. But no, really, in truth three things are fundamental to my self-image, and fundamental to how I approach and understand and interact with the world. So do you realize how hard it is to bore me with political news?

But the fact of it is this: nothing has changed in months. George Bush and John McCain still intend us to be bogged down in two or more land wars in Asia for at least an entire generation, thinking that's the best tool for protecting us from tiny and largely irrelevant criminal gangs, and nothing's changed that. Congress is too afraid of having something go wrong if they stop these stupid wars, and too willing to keep signing Bush's loan paperwork and too willing to let several young Americans die per day in order to not have to deal with this until they have a Democratic president who won't blame a Democratic congress if things go wrong. Barack Obama is still going to actually win the whole campaign, Hillary Clinton will still say or do anything however sleazy to try to persuade delegates to steal it for her, but she can't so today's particular accusations are neither likely to be true nor at all interesting. And no, we won't know until November if despite John McCain's intention to wreck the country with disastrous unnecessary wars and even more disastrous deficit spending, people will vote for this senile and clearly increasingly deranged old man who only has two virtues: he used to have an honest reputation, and he's neither black nor female. And Hillary's still a woman, and Obama is still black. We've known all of these things since February, at the very least.

It has been at least that long since anything actually changed, so I'm having an increasingly hard time justifying to myself why it's still on the news every night. I mean, I used to have two problems with the Monica Lewinsky story. First of all, it was trivial garbage, something that took at most a couple of nights' reporting to know everything that mattered about it and for any reasonably well informed and honest person to see it as what it was, a right-wing partisan witch-hunt, an attempt to win in Congress what they'd lost at the polls in November of '92 and '96. But my even bigger problem with it was that even on nights in which there was no actual news on the Monica Lewinsky story, it was still the top headline. No, really, I watch the news to hear something new, at least some new detail in an ongoing story; recapping the previous several months' worth of story without adding any new details night after night after expletive-deleted boring night, eventually ticks me off. And that's how I feel about this increasingly pointless and stupid Democratic nominating contest. I just want the damned thing to be over, and if I can't have that, I want the journalists I watch to wake up and realize that even if it's not over, it's not news, or at least not the top news story of the day every day, any more.

P.S. That being said, one thing did wake me up last night while watching the news, briefly: Keith Olbermann was in rare form, at his snarkiest best in a way he hasn't been in months. Check it out. (YouTube copy found via obama_2008.)