Like any car crash, it’s hard to look away.

Hello there. Been a while.

If you’re like me, in the last year you spent way too much time reading about politics. Some more time spent reading about politics can be useful and educational. The amount I — and I suspect many of us — spent gawking at the disaster that has been the last year was probably unhealthy.

One of the things that suffered most in my life was the time I spent reading other things. More substantial, wide-ranging or thought-provoking things that, say, might spark new ideas or even motivate one to write something themselves. Case in point, you may notice the last week this site was updated. Mostly I stared at the burning wreckage.

But hey, new year, fresh start and all that.

What have you spent less time doing than you used to, now that the world is a never-ending political circus you can’t stop watching and talking about?

Are you better for it and going to continue? If not, what are some of the things you’ve sacrificed to follow the nonsense that you’re looking to get back to?

“If I could drop this mic, I would, but it’s attached to the podium.”

While listening to Obama on WTF with Marc Maron I remember thinking, in that more conversational, less guarded interview with the president, that more than anything else, he’s a brilliant man that is deeply saddened he couldn’t do more as president.

A lot of those same feelings came through in his final State of the Union speech last week. He’s always been a great speaker, he’s obviously very smart, and wants to make an impact that makes America better. That made him a good president, even if the obstacles in his way (which he dedicated almost a quarter of the speech to addressing) kept him from being one of the great legends he idolized like Lincoln or Roosevelt.

But in another year he’ll be done, and still a relatively young, healthy, driven individual. Still a charismatic figure, still an educated law maker and policy wonk. Where does that potential turn next?

What would you like to see Obama do after being president?

Who’s post-presidency will his most resemble?

What would make the biggest difference?

What do you hope he definitely doesn’t do?

Even metaphorically, clowns are more sad than funny.

With his usual flair for brutal honesty and cutting language, Matt Taibbi writes about following the Republican clown car of primary campaigns over in Iowa to see what’s really going on. Though he may not have uncovered much we didn’t already know, he is able to distill the things that are driving us toward doomsday like few others can. See these few paragraphs near the piece’s conclusion:

Politics used to be a simple, predictable con. Every four years, the money men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they’ve always bought.

…

There’s no hidden platform behind the shallow facade. With Trump, the facade is the whole deal. If old-school policy hucksters like Christie can’t find a way to beat a media master like Trump at the ratings game, they will soon die out.

In a perverse way, Trump has restored a more pure democracy to this process. He’s taken the Beltway thinkfluencers out of the game and turned the presidency into a pure high-school-style popularity contest conducted entirely in the media. Everything we do is a consumer choice now, from picking our shoes to an online streaming platform to a presidential nominee.

He may be right; our obsession with outsized characters over policies and substance could still possibly lead to the most embarrassing candidate ever fielded by a major party. And what if he somehow won?

If we elected a truly unqualified, dangerously confrontational president (whether Trump 2016 or a theoretical, even worse candidate), what’s the worst that could happen?

Would it really be the end of America, or would checks and balances keep us from disaster?

Would he make it through a full term or would the public stop the charade?