Huffington Magazine Issue 72 | Page 34

Voices tion is enhanced by the isolating force of modern media. Americans can spend most of their waking hours enveloped in one journalistic gestalt or another, staring at one cable show/website version of reality or the other. It makes political differences harder to bridge. 6. CONGRESSIONAL IGNORANCE For a host of reasons — the collapse of Congress’ committee system, the frantic pace of media coverage, the increasing complexity of legislation, the rise of massive, catch-all “continuing resolutions,” the time spent on raising campaign cash — for all of those reasons and others, a shocking number of lawmakers have no idea what they are debating, denouncing or voting on. “An amazing percentage of people here are intellectually lazy or distracted or ignorant or all three,” one senator told me, anonymously. 7. GARGANTUAN MONEY As Democratic strate