Like most of the past six years or so, I'm feeling apprehensive and kinda "down" today. With the election momentum, I should feel more up, eh?

Part of it is the news. The election news is dominated this morning by reports of a GOP "surge" and by (what Billmon calls) appeals to the limbic part of voters brains by Rove. I suspect the "surge" is a bit of a distortion of a few polls and pushed by Rovian strategists. The stories of dirty politics abound, all by Republicans and now being actually endorsed by the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. Sorry, no links, trust me.

Dirty tricks have gone from being wrong, to being spawned/endorsed quietly by establishment political organizations to now being performed out in the open with those who conceive them called "genius". And like negative ads, they do it because it works. This means that to counter these idiots, Democrats will have to adopt these tactics as well which further drives politics into the mud.

I guess I'm down about the state of voters. Crappy politics shouldn't work. But American voters are so ill-informed, lazy, apathetic and uninvolved that virtually by default, our Democracy may be dying.

UPDATE: Perhaps I'm being too tough on voters. Atrios has a simple answer to a simple question which may spread around the responsibility for this crap a bit.