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Hooked

Just saw the West Wing on Danish telly. It's always great watching that show because, for one thing, it gives me an hour a week where I can blissfully pretend that America has a Democratic president again. For another thing it's exquisitely written. (I've heard from my friends in the US that the later seasons weren't that great, but we're still on the second season here, since everything hits Danish TV like five years after it's already aired over there).

But what also gets me about politics, especially now with the Democratic primaries making big news in the US, is what a sick rush I get out of it all. It's got big stakes, personalities, idealism, drama, lies, betrayal, blood, filth, villainy and every expression of sheer human depravity you can imagine. American politics are as good as Shakespeare (except the dialogue isn't nearly as good). And it's that sick intensity that pulls me in—the furious desire to give the bastards hell. Sometimes you win and sometimes the bastards win, but it's that powerplay, the game and the adrenalin, that make it feel like an aphrodesiac to me. (There are few things as sexy for me as a powerful, politically-savvy girl with sharp wits, who likes to make the bad guys suffer—in the early 90s I had an almost-unbearable teenage-like crush on Dee Dee Myers).

I just dug up something I wrote just after the 98 midterm elections... It's a little dated, especially since Bush the Lesser and Evil Dick made it to the White House, but it kinda catches the feeling...