CAMERON COLUMN: We've hit rock bottom

This election is making me angry.

No, no... not necessarily at specific national and local candidates, although...

My displeasure does extend to the question of how some of these bellowing heads got to BE candidates for anything beyond neighborhood trash monitor.

I’m angry at all of it, at what former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe has called “...a Dumpster-fire campaign from top to bottom.”

I’m even furious at my own profession, the legitimate mainstream press, for sinking to the level of those goofy blogs spouting idiotic rumors that now are the everyday meat and drink of the Internet.

I’m mad as hell that political campaigns cost so much money that candidates must suck up to somebody with deep pockets or pack it in — wasting vast amounts of money that could fund cancer research, shelter the homeless or provide life-saving food and medicine in almost any third-world country.

YEAH, I’m angry with you, too.

And that’s the collective you, as in... everyone who has allowed these crazy, stupid, wrongheaded types of elections to exist in the United States of America.

Point at Idaho and other individual states, as well.

No one is exempt here.

You can be damn certain the Founding Fathers — so often quoted by candidates who don’t have a clue about what those men actually had in mind — would be thoroughly disgusted by what they see in the 21st century.

Yet WE did it.

We allowed this to happen, this political insanity — absolutely all of us, as a county, state and nation.

We did it with a combination of apathy on one hand (America’s vote totals are

embarrassingly low compared to anywhere else on the planet), and on the other hand, raging righteousness without much actual knowledge.

The HUGE majority of this country’s 323 million people don’t really know much about who and what they’re voting for — assuming they vote at all.

Being louder and more aggressive toward people on the “other side” does NOT equate to actual knowledge, facts or informed opinion.

It’s just noise, which now has edged toward hostility and seems to be racing toward actual violence.

Yeah, go ahead and put your hand over your heart for THAT!

LEAVING out individual candidates and races for a minute, we have a system that requires those infamous “special interests” to buy influence by paying to win a campaign.

Any campaign.

Lobbyists win elections, pushing aside actual candidates whom you recognize in the grocery store.

So yes, the money is a disgrace.

We, all of us, spend enough cash trying to elect one U.S. senator — somebody who has been in Congress about 30 years and often voted AGAINST our interests back home — that we could use to build hospitals throughout the poorest parts of Africa.

And the presidential race?

We could completely rebuild Haiti for the price of all the crap we’ve heard from both sides.

CONSIDER: This presidential campaign has produced accusations of treason, a virtual admission of sexual assault, even a very credible possibility that Russia (yes, RUSSIA!) has hacked its way into influencing voters.

The head of the FBI, someone every American should trust in order to sleep safely at night, has been accused of dabbling in the election...by BOTH sides.

The guy may have broken the law.

No biggie, though, because countless people from both major parties in various races across the country probably have broken laws somewhere in the midst of Wolffe’s “Dumpster-fire campaign.”

Our country, this place of which we are all so pompously proud, has become a global joke.

It’s like we went to bed one night and woke up to discover we’ve become Venezuela — only wasting MUCH more money.

FINALLY, we come to the item that chaps me the most.

Americans have reached a point that we’re pretty much ready to punch each other over political positions — despite the fact that the vast majority of voting citizens are staggeringly ignorant of the facts and issues about which they are screaming.

We take positions based on slogans or 20-second sound bites from speeches designed solely to ignite you without offering even a whit of actual information.

And we’ve fallen for it, millions of us.

We’ve reached the point where politicians and their surrogates — I just loathe that word — now feel free to invent facts, change positions depending on the latest polls, and knowingly tell outright lies.

They do it because they can, because most people in this country don’t know enough to say: “Wait a minute!”

A LOBBYIST for the pharmaceutical industry or the sickening insurance empire will decide your “representatives” at all but the most local levels of government — where, bless them, a few everyday folk struggle at the margins of bureaucracy.

President of the United States?

Whoever wins will have been awarded the office by spending an astronomical amount of money, then herding the highest number of glassy-eyed cattle into the pen.

The entire system of “government of the people, by the people and for the people” is broken almost beyond any recognition.

The democracy for which so many brave souls fought and died to defend has disappeared into a sinkhole of ignorance and mutinous, dog-whistle fury.

We damn well should be ashamed.

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Steve Cameron is a special assignment reporter for The Press. Reach Steve at scameron@cdapress.com.