Ask the Little Bald Bastard

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Have you ever thought about politics?
- Will Vote For Food

Dear Will Vote For Food,
  I burn a lot of brain cells fuming about how modern political discourse sounds like an elementary school playground. Contentious issues are debated in a more verbose version of "nuh uh!" "yuh huh!" and there's a remarkable amount of noise that carries very little information.

  However, I suspect that the thrust of your question is whether or not I've ever considered running for office. I have considered it, and pretty much ruled it out. I'm appalled by the the money-driven campaigning process. I find the personalities and people who are attracted to politics irksome. I can't stomach the necessary pandering to every group and interest that it takes to get elected. Finally, there's enough questionable conduct in my misspent past that I doubt I'd survive the public vivisection that awaits a candidate for any office higher than dogcatcher.

  But the thing that turns me off most about American politics is the way that anyone who has the temerity to allow their opinions to be influenced by actual events is labeled a "flip-flopper." Seriously? The whole of scientific and intellectual pursuit is grounded in the proposition that you have to be willing to scrutinize your beliefs. You base your opinions on the best available evidence, but if new evidence undermines those beliefs, you have to be willing to abandon them, no matter how compelling or comfortable they are.

  That's why science is inherently progressive. You can believe as hard as you want that the Universe revolves around the Earth, until somebody points out that the other planets move in a way that only be explained if they and the Earth are all orbiting the sun. At that point, I want the people in charge* of my country to have the intellectual fortitude to not jam their heads in the sand and insist that the Universe is heliocentric.

  If, to use a purely hypothetical example, you support a military action due in part to evidence that the target is trying to build a nuclear weapon, and latter it turns out that the nuclear weapon bits were incorrect, withdrawing your support for that military action wouldn't make you indecisive. It would make you a person who values truth over slavish devotion to an erroneous idea.

  And yet, for some unfathomable reason, the American voting public relates to its elected officials like a four-year-old to its father. Daddy knows everything; he can answer every question you pose, and he's never wrong. Why would he ever need to change his mind?

  All of that is a long way of saying that I don't think I could get elected to political office. I don't believe I have a soul to sell, but I do value what's left of my brain, and I pride myself on a modicum of ability to think critically. Until being a successful politician doesn't necessitate coating one's brain in intellectual cement to block out new information, I'll have to stay on the "despondent voter" side of the political equation.

* For purposes of America, assume these people are old, rich white men.