Brown's Victory Validates Everything I've Been Saying

My name is Joshua, and I'm an addict. If I don't get my news fix, I start sweating and get all twitchy and freaked out.

This is a terrible problem for me, because I would like nothing more in the world than to simply boycott the mainstream media for the next couple of weeks.

Now, there are a lot of reasons the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy is now in GOP hands, and plenty of blame to go around. But I have no doubt that, despite everything else, Coakley would have won by 20 points if unemployment were at 8-9 percent (and the trend were moving downward), and I can't imagine that she would have had a serious Republican challenger if it were at 6-7 percent.

People always blame the party in power, they always believe that the White House has a magic lever that controls the economy, and for me that reality trumps all the rest. Yes, Coakley ran a shitty campaign, yes, the Dems nationalized the race too late, and, yes, they haven't achieved any big legislative victories about which to brag. But if all that were true and the economy were recovering, Coakley'd be measuring the drapes right now anyway.

That seems pretty straightforward to me. And I'm pretty depressed about the prospect of being subjected to weeks and weeks of shoddy "analysis" whereby everyone and their cousin claims that this race validates all their long-held ideological beliefs. I guess I can count myself fortunate in that I'll only have to absorb the written crap -- I won't be forced to watch the cable news.