Almost a year ago I met someone who claimed they voted for John McCain because they felt sorry for him. They saw his numbers in the polls, factored in his age, and felt it was a shame he was going to lose the campaign and thought a vote for him might make him feel better.

I thought this was just one person with a possibly wacky point of view.

A few months ago there was an election in South Carolina for Senator. An unknown named Alvin Green, with no money spent on campaigning, beat an established Democratic lawmaker. It had the makings of a political Cinderella story until Alvin Greene spoke. He came off as Gomer Pyle’s not so smart cousin. Accusations flew that he was a plant for the Republicans or that somehow this simpleton was manipulated into running for office. Oh, there was also the little bit about him possibly making sexual advances on a college student. I followed the case with fascination because while the establishment was trying to paint this byzantine plot, having been in South Carolina weeks before the election I suspected it was something less sinister going on.

After a full investigation had been made, and when people got over their embarrassment, it turned out Alvin Greene did save up the money needed to file for the campaign, thus tossing out one theory, and as for his election result, it seemed a combination of voter laziness/ignorance, his name being at the top of the ballot and people assuming he was Al Green the singer got him nominated. Alvin Greene has had a few public appearances since his election and has a small campaign staff. While it is fascinating to watch this from the outside it is unlikely he will become a Senator. He still has the speaking style of a slow witted Gomer Pyle.

A few months ago Jan Brewer was a political darling on the Republican side. This Arizona governor had stood up to the Washington establishment and signed into law SB1070, the anti-immigration law. Talk show radio hosts rallied to her aid, because illegal immigration is such an important topic. After some time, investigations started to immerge, suggesting the law may have been less to curb immigration than it was to line the pocket of lobbyist for the private prison industry. One local Arizona television station that had been especially hard in its investigation soon found themselves losing her political campaign ads. Brewer had also been criticized by painting Arizona as a crime riddled state with kidnappings, drug smuggling and beheadings a common occurrence, even though evidence suggested otherwise.

It was this climate that surrounded the recent debate and the infamous gaps in her opening statement and subsequent meltdown when confronted by reporters after the debate. It was rather amazing to see the same pundits, bloggers and radio talk show hosts that sang her praises weeks earlier suddenly suggesting, without a wink and a nod, that maybe Jan Brewer had a drinking problem which caused her bad performance. Yes the same people that praised her now turned their back on her and, with a campaigned that seemed orchestrated, was willing to tell the public they felt she was a drunk.

All of these incidents illustrate, unfortunately, how bad WE are as a voting public and how WE are getting the government we deserve. It has been said many times and I could have used illustrations about Tea Party candidates or the movement, or I could have used the recent Glenn Beck rally to illustrate my point, but honestly people are as defensive of their position on the movement as the person I know who voted for McCain out of sympathy. You can try to point out the flaws in the logic, but they are emotionally attached to their idea they, maybe embarrassed on some level, they are unwilling to admit they are wrong.

I saw this happen in the reports in reaction to Alvin Greene’s election and Jan Brewer’s performance. I remember this one man who was very indignant that Alvin Greene won, even though he later admitted for voting for him. He couldn’t give a reason why he voted for Greene, but felt if he knew about pending legal case against Greene he would have voted for the other fellow. Now, he didn’t know a thing about the other person in the race and admitted he didn’t know about Alvin Greene, so the unanswered question was still why did he vote for Alvin Greene? We never got an answer.

There have been interviews with Arizona voters on the Jan Brewer debate and, surprisingly, many feel sorry for her. They feel like she is an old aunt who had a ‘senior moment’ not a politician who should be able to introduce herself to the voting public and who failed miserably. They don’t think of her as a politician who should be able to answer the questions of reporters. I heard one woman say Brewer was under a lot of pressure because she was facing so much from the Federal government, the President and the UN. She felt ‘sorry’ for the governor.

This country is facing a lot of issues in the coming years, and it seems people are more interested in feelings rather than facts. We don’t research the issues or the candidates even though we have information at our disposal to confirm things we hear. There is a radio talk show host out of Los Angeles that I constantly have to have Goggle up to listen to. The reason is he is so bad at getting the facts straight or hiding information to fit his own agenda you need to do a quick search to see if what he is saying is correct or not. The thing is I doubt many people even bother to try this, because he is saying what they are feeling and they feel it is right.

Here’s an example; he quoted an article about women who were getting into prostitution in Nevada. He focused on one nineteen year old woman who got into the profession to support her boyfriend and his family. Well, he just went off on the woman and the family, wondering what sort of family would allow their son’s girlfriend to support them. For almost five minutes he came up with scenarios of how embarrassed the family must be, and then took calls which only reinforced his point of view.

Now, if he actually gave the audience the fully story of the nineteen year old, which was in the article, they would have seen the boyfriend was diagnosed with leukemia and had no health insurance. She had tried working at ‘a regular job’ but her income wasn’t enough and she couldn’t get insurance for her boyfriend. While the talk show host joked about what the father of the boyfriend must feel like getting money from the girlfriend because of prostitution, he must have missed the part in the article where it said the father was dead and that the mother and the girlfriend were supporting the boyfriend because of lack of insurance. While there might be questions about the morality of selling your body, and I can fully understand it, when the nineteen year old, and I’m going to be more conservative in my numbers than the article was factoring in good and bad periods, is taking in about $1000 a week on average being at a brothel and was getting less than $300 a week at her former job, I can see why she would make the transition. I’m not saying its right, but the income for what she is doing is definitely a plus.

The thing is that doesn’t give the audience a good vs. evil storyline. It doesn’t give them the clean feeling of being superior to the poor souls who have to stoop so low to make ends meet.