47%

Is anyone else sick of the media? I don't know what's going on anymore and I feel like I'm living in a gigantic fishbowl. (The election? Damned if I know who's going to win. Go to the polls and you'd think Obama. Do a little digging and if they're right that pollsters are using models from 2008 instead of 2010 then the whole thing could be flawed to beat hell! Who knows what's really going on!) Go to a mainstream media website or a left-leaning blog and you'd think President Obama was cruising to victory. Go to conservative media and blogs and you'd think Romney is still hanging in there waiting for his inevitable victory. All the media keeps throwing up is bullshit minutia, week after week after week. The latest:

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

First of all- and leaving aside the fact that I don't care all that much, why is this quote any different from this one:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Remember this one? This is the quote that people were convinced had cost President Obama the election in 2008. It didn't and by and large, it didn't matter all that much.

So where does that leave us? One candidate thinks we're entitled layabouts and the other thinks we're clinging to our guns and religion. (Yeah, the Cigar is based in flyover country so that makes me one of the unwashed masses to the coastal elite, I guess) And here's the thing: 47% of Americans don't pay any income tax. Romney wasn't wrong about that. And we can be a bunch of entitled whiners when we want to be, myself included (I did sign that 'shovel ready stimulus' thing that floated around the internet a few years back calling for student loan forgiveness.) And 47% of the people who are going to vote on Election Day have probably locked themselves into to voting for President Obama.

Not a lot of what Mittens said is actually wrong. The fact that 47% of the country pays no taxes is a huge problem as is the billion dollar industry that's sprung up dedicated to helping Americans wring every last sent out of the government. We're all about tax avoidance in this country. It's what we do.

But how do you pay for ObamaCare if half the country isn't paying into the government at all? How do you make better public schools? How do you keep the lights on?

For the privilege of living in a free nation, we should pay just a little bit. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society. Though given the level of discourse that we see in our culture and in our society today, it should surprise nobody that 47% of the people don't pay. I'm surprised that 53% actually do.