If you are a political junkie and weird is your thing, the events of last week-and-a-half or so have certainly been hitting your sweet spot.
Or making you plummet to new levels of exasperation. Maybe a bit of both.
Those of us in the professional political media trade have been marveling aloud at how things have been playing out, especially since the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on July 13. When you think about it, however, things really began to get bizarre immediately after the June 27 debate between Trump and Joe Biden.
Most of us expected things to be a lot different this election year, but we didn't expect the political world to spin off its axis every 36 hours.
On Monday night, when we were all wondering whether the President of the United States might be dead and if an elaborate cover-up to keep that from the public might be underway, I tweeted this:
I haven't had most of what's happened in the last ten days on my bingo card. I need a new bingo card.
— SFK (@stephenkruiser) July 23, 2024
On Tuesday, my friend and colleague Chris Queen wrote a post with the headline "I Didn't Have 'Jimmy Carter Death Hoax' on My Bingo Card."
Yes, we are all in the throes of bingo card failure here in the Republic. It's as if we were issued standard bingo cards with numbers at the beginning of the year, but now that the game has started, the balls have nothing but emojis on them.
(Bingo Caller)
"G—Smiling Face With Sunglasses."
"B—Rolling on the Floor Laughing."
"N—Shocked Face With Exploding Head."
I'd probably yell "BINGO!" after that last one no matter what.
We are all expecting the unexpected now, but that doesn't prepare us all that well for what might come next.
One thing I have noticed, though, is that the challenge of the firehose news cycles has reenergized my inner political junkie, which I thought was dead forever. For a long time, it's just been work. Don't get me wrong, I love work. However, I rarely talked about politics when I wasn't working. Now I have friends who have never been that political texting me when news breaks.
It's going to be a bumpy ride between now and November 5, but I think that we're all now aware that it isn't going to be a boring one.
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