Betty Winston Baye': The Elephants Leave Town; Their You-Know-What Remains.

Betty Winston Baye'
The elephants leave town; their you-know-what remains

Yes, my little chickadees, the circus is about to leave town. The ringmasters, the clowns, the elephants, the trapeze artists and the tattooed lady (that would be the John McCain supporter who apparently carved a "B" into her own cheek and then blamed it on a big, black Barack Obama supporter) are almost packed.

But the smoldering heaps of dung this menagerie will leave is going to stink for a while, and maybe longer than usual if Barack Obama wins the presidency.

This election season is an example of what W.C. Fields must have had in mind when he said, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, dazzle them with bull."

The bull has certainly been flying. And though some will argue that I should insert the parenthetical that both sides are equally guilty, I don't believe that's true. Nobody accuses McCain of being an "other" or a terrorist.

But how about that bull from Gov. Sarah Palin that it was the plan all along that the clothes on which the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 to outfit her, a supposed consignment store-shopping hockey mom, her "First Dude" and their kids, would be donated to charity?

Yeah, and pigs can fly.

Alaska, size-wise, is the nation's biggest state. That may explain why two of Alaska's leading politicians -- Palin and senior U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens -- have been caught telling some big lies.

Stevens was found guilty this week of accepting gifts from a certain oil industry executive, who apparently has benefited from the connection. Stevens, an Indianapolis native, is seeking re-election. He has represented Alaska in Congress since 1964. He's been a senator since 1968 and holds the Republican record for continuous service in that body.

Stevens' wife, a partner in a major law firm, actually testified that she had no idea where her own family's furniture disappeared to, or that the furnishings that replaced it had come from Bill Allen, the oil exec.

In fact, Catherine Stevens said that she never liked the replacement furniture. Yet, she kept it for seven years.

See what I mean about pigs flying?

More seriously, though, the hysteria whipped up during this campaign may resonate for years.

Hysteria such as what prompted an anonymous caller to the newspaper to refer to Obama as "a baby-killing Muslim." Hysteria that prompted a caller, who disagreed with The Courier-Journal's endorsement of Obama, to leave a message for a colleague that said, "F -- your liberal ways, you nigger-lovin' bitch." The hysteria that even at this late date has people insisting that Obama isn't eligible for the presidency because he was born in Hawaii, which, like Alaska, became a state 1959, two years before Obama was born.

Yet more serious, however, is the hysteria that provoked someone to hang Obama in effigy from a tree on the University of Kentucky campus. Obama probably won't swing Kentucky, but this is ridiculous. Then there's the case of the two young white supremacists, who authorities say threatened to assassinate Obama while wearing white tuxes and top hats.

People get these ugly ideas from somewhere. Sadly, it's very often from political candidates.

Kentucky's senior Sen. Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in Congress, seemed to be trying to covertly make some point by including in his response to The C-J's decision to endorse his opponent a line about California's elected officials in Congress who are "fighting to ban off-shore drilling for American oil and promoting their San Francisco values."

Say what?

This may not be the ugliest election in the history of the Republic, but it is undoubtedly one of the stupidest. The argument, for example, that it was a liberal media trick for CBS' Katie Couric to ask Palin which newspapers and magazines she read "to stay informed and to understand the world." And how priceless was the expression on Joe Biden's face when he seemed to believe that a Florida news anchor was just joshing with him when she quoted Karl Marx and then asked, "How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?"

But as I said, this circus is almost over. Presumably life will return to normal, though honestly, it's harder than ever to figure out what normal is in America these days.

Americans have always had strong political disagreements, and the beauty of the system, Americans love to boast, is that Americans have the right to publicly disagree. But in this election season, a lot of folks just seem to have gone completely bonkers.

I wrote weeks ago that when this election is over, there may be value in all of us retreating to some psychiatrist's couch to help us figure out what in the hell just happened to us.

But now we're in the 11th hour before Election Day, and we still have people saying that they don't know enough yet about McCain and Obama to choose between the two. If I were a judge, I'd sentence these people to repeated listenings of soul singer Teddy Pendergrass' golden oldie with the lines that say, "If you don't know me by now, you will never, never, never know me. All the things that we've been through. You should understand me like I understand you."

But for those who really don't know by now, something else said that W.C. Fields said might help -- "I never vote for anyone. I always vote against."

Betty Winston Bayé is a Courier-Journal columnist and editorial writer. Her column appears Thursdays on the editorial page. Read her online at courier-journal.com/opinion. Her e-mail address is bbaye@courier-journal.com.