It's the system, stupid

Well, the US presidential election is upon us and thus so is the late-night coverage.  The late, semi-great Gore Vidal is no longer with us to deliver the shambling, incoherent rant he did in 2008, capping it by denigrating David Dimbleby with a contemptuous “Who are you?”  The BBC electoral team was also taken apart by the Republican John Bolton for not knowing there stuff (though he used it to his advantage to say things they could not rebut).  Simon Schama will no doubt reprise his role as savant, Jester to Dimbleby’s Lear.  Yet I will still watch the BBC.  In newspaper terms for news coverage, they are like The Times, solid, conservative moderates.  ITV is like The Daily Express, Sky is like The Daily Telegraph and Channel 4 like The Guardian.  Except, importantly, the BBC is not The Times, a Rupert Murdoch organ.

It’s striking though that there are actually four more presidential candidates that no-one talks about – Gary Johnson (formerly a Republican) from the Libertarians, Jill Stein from the Greens, Virgil Goode from the Constitution Party and the flamboyantly named Rocky Anderson from the Justice Party.  And then again, it isn’t striking at all – none of these candidates are on the ballot in every single state (Oklahoma seems particularly resistant), none will win a state and so none will win the presidential election.  In The Simpsons’ Citizen Kang (Treehouse of Horror VII), after accidentally killing the captive Bill Clinton and Bob Dole by flushing them out into space, Homer Simpson crash-lands the UFO in Washington D.C. and unmasks the slobbering aliens Kang and Kodos who were impersonating the candidates.  But the extra-terrestrials are not fazed.  Kang boasts, “It doesn’t matter.  You have to vote for one of us.  It’s a two-party system!  Ha ha ha ha!”  Ross Perot is then pictured punching through his election hat.  The Americans become enslaved and Marge complains “Why are we building a death ray to attack a planet I’ve never even heard of” (an expert indictment of American foreign policy) to which Homer retorts, “Don’t blame me.  I voted for Kodos.”