Misty Eyed with Neary

(image source)

No Scott Simon this morning...but fear not, Lynn Neary showed she could be a schlock-trooper with the best of them. After considering the ugliness of negative campaign ads, she launches into a dreamy (*viewer discretion advised) paen to the US Congress and our Election system:

"I can still go up to Capitol Hill and get all misty eyed thinking about how members of Congress come to Washington from all over the country, from wildly different backgrounds, with radically different ideas about how to run the country—and somehow they have to figure out how to work together....the idea of it really is grand and so is election day.

Wooaaah..."wildly different backgrounds" and "radically different ideas"? Something is in the water cooler at NPR. Let's just have a little reality check. Members of congress are overwhelmingly RICH! They are overwhelmingly MALE. They are overwhelmingly WHITE. They mostly get elected with CORPORATE CASH. And except for 1 lonely member each in the House and the Senate, all members are from the Republican or Democratic party, which are remarkably similar in the overarching ideology and voting trends.

Neary ends the piece by stating how in an election "we're all doing something for the common good by casting our ballots." Yes, we voters are doing something, but whether it is for the "common good" is highly debatable and whether our votes will even be accurately tallied or even counted (see my earlier post) is another story all together.