At last, it’s safe to turn on the television without the chilling fear that you’ll have to sit through 20 political commercials in a row. The only good thing anyone can say about them is that they drove the Snuggie and ShamWow ads off the air for a few months. Can there still be anyone out there who wants a Snuggie but doesn’t have one? They are like those wives and children and bank managers of dead African dictators who can’t seem to get their $100 million out of their Swiss bank without your help. Is there anyone left who still falls for that?

After watching an evening’s worth of campaign commercials, it was always shocking to wake up in the morning and find that the electricity was still on, that there weren’t tent villages of the homeless on the front lawn, that my bank machine still spits out cash, that there weren’t gangs of Molotov-cocktail-throwing thugs roaming the streets, and that people were still shopping at the mall, even though, according to the commercials, the country was falling apart. It may not be perfect, but it ain’t Haiti either.