I was reading a favorite message board the other day and, after reading for a while, I thought to myself, “If I were as jumpy as these people, I’d have had six heart attacks by now instead of four.” The political internet is the land of the excitable, and I know that I’m as susceptible to it as anyone, it’s a place where politicians careers are declared dead eight thousand times each day and where the smallest of incidents or the tiniest of setbacks can morph into the dawning of the End Times.

Take, for example, the drop in the Dow on Friday. Rational people, I think, understand that Stock Markets go both up and down. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t serve their purpose. Sane people, I think, realize that the Dow can be down a hundred on Friday and up two hundred on Monday or, well, whatever. But the internet is not conducive to sanity.

I couldn’t count the number of times last yeah when I saw either Bush or Kerry proclaimed as “finished” (admittedly, several hundred of the times for the latter spewed from my own keyboard). I can’t count the number of predictions of imminent disasters that have failed to materialize.

Speculation is wonderful. We all like to speculate. But irrational speculation is dangerous. One discussion of the Dow on Friday led to, within a few posts, one individual predicting the forthcoming onset of the next Great Depression and another member wandering off into speculation about “when Bush dissolves Congress” or some other such nonsense. Such nonsense. But it’s potentially deadly nonsense.

It’s all well and good for people to have a simplistic view of the world. It’s altogether another for them to have an entirely irrational view of the world based upon conspiracy theories and obvious falsehoods. It’s even worse when people are likely to jump to, and then have reinforced by others, those same bizarre conclusions.

My advice (which I often fail to follow) is to try to emotionally distance yourself from the news. A good general rule to recall is that nothing, almost nothing at least, is as bad as it sounds or as its presented. The media will hype anything and everything.

Whenever I watch and listen to predictions from the media, I recall an episode of the Simpsons where Springfield’s local News Anchor, Kent Brockman, is reporting upon the launch of a Space Shuttle carrying “Average American Astronaut” Homer Simpson. Upon seeing an ant drift by a camera with is size magnified by its position, Brockman jumps to the conclusion that the spacecraft has been, “taken over, conquered if you will, by a giant race of space ants.” Within moments he is declaring that, “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.”

I doubt if I’m the only one who has had doubts about the viability of democracy in a world where at least half the people are apparently stupid, gullible, and crazy. The internet is great for many things, but it has not been a success in improving the degree to which the average person is informed politically.

Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying that the best argument against democracy was a five minute conversation with the average voter. I’ve yet to see anything to convince me that that isn’t fundamentally true. Whenever I think of the average voter, I recall the woman who, in 1964, said she was voting for Lyndon Johnson because, if Barry Goldwater was elected, he was going to take away her TV. When someone then explained to her that Senator Goldwater was against the Tennessee Valley Authority, not her Television, she responded, “Well, I’m not taking any chances.”

As much as I admire the President and his team, even I have to admit that there’s something disturbing about them standing in front of a banner with some simplistic regurgitation of their policy scrawled across it eight thousand times (“Defending America From Foreign Aggression”, “Sound Energy and Whale Oil Policy”, etc.).

More on this another night.