I already wrote the post about the ads. This one isn’t about the ads. This one is about the news coverage — all of it, hour after hour, day after day, about one thing and one thing only: this election. I don’t care who wins anymore. I just want this whole stupid thing to be over with. And I don’t think I’m in a tiny minority on that. I think a lot of people would be perfectly happy if the election were today, it ended tonight, and we never had to hear about it again.
Twenty-four-hour news was supposed to be a great thing. Cable channels, choices, diversity of options — and it is a great thing, right up until it isn’t. Because the downside is that they all follow one story into the ground. Every channel, the same story, all day. The only people that serves are the channels themselves, the major papers, and their sycophants.
Right now they’re spending hours dragging out stories like the Ilhan Omar marriage and immigration allegations. One member of Congress. There are 435 of them. She’s in what even the coverage concedes is one of the safest blue districts in the country, and she will in all likelihood be re-elected no matter what the accusations are. That’s not a big story. That’s a noise story, kept alive because it’s election season and the hours have to be filled with something.
And they’re selling all of it as the most important election in our lifetimes. It’s not. None of them are. I’ll get to why in a minute.
Here’s my prediction for Tuesday, and I want it on the record so we can check it. The coverage will start sometime in the afternoon, before a single poll has closed on the East Coast — I’ll guess around 3 PM our time, the Bret Baier hour. Then it will run continuously for something like nine hours, sliding west with the poll closings. Same on Fox, same on CNN, same on MS NOW, same on Newsmax.
Which raises a serious question. If aliens landed on the White House lawn on Tuesday, would they interrupt the election coverage for that? I don’t know. I couldn’t say yes. Maybe a couple of minutes — unless the aliens blew up the White House.
Meanwhile, out in the actual world, things are happening that you’re not hearing about.
Take Ukraine. I’m only using it as an example, but it’s a big example. It’s the largest land war in Europe since World War II. Did you hear anything about it today? Yesterday? When was the last major story you saw?
According to CSIS, in a study published in July, Russia has lost somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000 men killed since February 2022, out of about 1.4 million casualties in all. Ukraine has lost between 125,000 and 150,000 killed. Put the two together and you’re looking at 525,000 to 600,000 soldiers dead, and over two million casualties — killed, wounded or missing.
For scale: the United States lost about 58,000 dead in Vietnam, over roughly ten years. Russia has lost nearly ten times that number in about four and a half years. That’s the comparison. And on American television, on a normal day now, Ukraine gets next to nothing. We have reporters in the Middle East — if somebody spits at Israel, that makes the headlines. Ukraine? Silence.
Or take something closer to home, something that isn’t a war at all.
This week the USDA confirmed the first case of New World screwworm in Arizona — in a dog in Cochise County, down on the border. Screwworm is a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on living tissue: livestock, wildlife, pets, and only rarely people. We eradicated it from this country in the 1960s. It has been working its way back north through Mexico, and now it’s here.
The numbers are moving. The first American case in this outbreak was in Texas in June. We’re now at 71 cases across three states, 18 of them still active — and 19 of those cases came in October alone, against 3 in September. Last week it turned up in wildlife for the first time, in an elk in West Texas. Once it’s in wildlife, it gets much harder to stop.
Now, about the threat to people, let’s be precise, because the USDA is. It’s not a human health crisis, it’s an economic one. The USDA is worried because it’s hurting cattle, pushing beef prices up, and once it’s in wildlife it gets harder to contain. That’s why a story that touches everyone’s grocery bill is getting buried by election coverage.
The Department of Agriculture is not treating this casually. For that one Arizona dog, they activated their response playbook: a roughly 12-mile infested zone with controls on moving animals, more surveillance and trapping, and releases of sterile flies. The Secretary of Agriculture was in Nogales this week in person. They’ve released more than 1.6 billion sterile flies, they’re releasing 100 million a week, and they’ve put $25 million into a sterile-fly facility at Douglas. Governments don’t spend that kind of money and effort on something that doesn’t worry them.
And here’s the part that ought to embarrass the coverage. Politicians are on television every night talking about affordability — about groceries, in general. Well, here’s a specific one. A named, concrete threat to the domestic cattle stock we have, to the beef supply, and to what you pay at the meat counter. Not a slogan. A parasite. And you have almost certainly not heard a word about it on cable news, because Newt Gingrich was busy talking about the political landscape.
So back to the “most important election in our lifetimes.” Say the Democrats take both houses — 51 senators, about 230 in the House, Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer running the Senate again. So what?
The President is still Donald Trump. Any bill he doesn’t like, he vetoes. He’ll just veto, veto, veto, veto. Overriding him takes two-thirds of the House — 290 out of 435 — and two-thirds of the Senate — 67 out of 100. They will never have that. And even getting an ordinary bill through the Senate takes 60 votes just to end debate. You can pass as many bills as you want. The president has that veto pen.
And for Trump, the veto pen carries no consequences at all. This is his last term. He has two years left, he’s term-limited by the Constitution, he can’t be voted out in 2028, and there’s no higher office for him to run for.
We’ve run this exact experiment, with the parties flipped. In the 114th Congress, from January 2015 to January 2017 — the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency — Republicans held both houses of Congress. Obama held the veto pen. They voted over and over to repeal Obamacare; the one repeal bill that actually reached his desk, in January 2016, he vetoed, and the override failed. He vetoed the Keystone XL pipeline bill too. Same result.
In eight years, Obama only had one veto overridden — and it was on a very narrow issue that both sides could agree on. That was JASTA (Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act), the law that lets the families of 9/11 victims sue foreign sponsors of terrorism in American courts. Obama vetoed it in September 2016 because he thought it would let other countries haul the United States into their courts the same way. Congress overrode him, 97 to 1 in the Senate and 348 to 77 in the House. One override, in eight years, on the one issue where nearly everybody agreed. That’s the whole list.
That’s what a midterm flip against a sitting president actually buys you: committees, investigations, noise — and no law the president doesn’t want. The election that will actually matter is the presidential one in 2028, when a president and a Congress of the same party might be able to move something.
So no, I don’t think this is the most important election in our lifetimes. I think it’s wall-to-wall coverage of an election whose result, in the long term, changes remarkably little — while a war that has killed over half a million soldiers and a parasite eating its way into the American cattle herd go essentially unreported.
On November 4th it’ll be over. We’ll get a few fairly quiet months. Then in January it starts picking up again for 2028, and it builds and builds.
I don’t care who wins. I just want it to be over.
THE REPUBLIC WILL ENDURE
Read more
Ukraine casualties:
- Russian Blood and Treasure: The Ballooning Costs of Putin’s War — CSIS, July 2026
- The Russia-Ukraine War Report Card — Russia Matters
Screwworm: