Decision '08: Total Coverage or Anti-Blog Bomb Shelter?

I VERGE BETWEEN TWO extremes when it comes to following the many — and no doubt eventually far more than many — politics blogs into the coming chaos of the 2008 electoral period. (I don't say "2008 campaign," as that debatably began two years ago.)

Part of me is very concerned about making the right decisions on the state and federal level next November, and therefore urges me to amp up my absorption of the available facts. I'm talking way beyond my fascination with the shuffling of the primary dates. Left, right, centrist, read 'em all, with a hefty dose of the daily newspapers to get something held to someone's idea of a journalistic standard.

The other part of me – and I admit I picked this idea up from someone on the Net whose name escapes me – wishes nothing more than to stop reading all politics blogs until I am sealed in the voting chamber next year. The concept of reading ten blogs a day that obsess over minutiae, without addressing the core issues and all of the sorts of things the national media failed to unearth about, say, Dear Leader, makes my spine hurt. One counterargument here is that the entire media, not just the blogosphere, will probably also make this sort of hay over unimportant bullshit of the most minuscule importance . . . probably right after picking up a few column breakers from their own blog grazing.

All I know is that I plan to take, at least, Election Day 2008 off, and possibly the next day, as I did in 2004 to monitor the results from my compound. Though I am no Hunter S. Thompson, who could absorb slugs of political junk by the veinload and cover the story, for good or ill. By that Wednesday, the results were not yet settled, and I decamped to Atlantic City, radio reports of disputes in Ohio booming in my car. I remember quite clearly seeing the news of Kerry's concession while in the Borgata poker room. I happened to go to the cage to buy more chips, and I broke the news to the cashier. Her mute, shocked silence, her stricken demeanor, spoke volumes.