This week the Vice Presidential Debate is coming to my neck of the woods. I could go to watch on a large screen with throngs of people who have submitted to humiliating security measures, and maybe hang out for the Marshall Tucker Band (well, one original member and some other guys), but in general, I prefer sifting through debates by reading snarky real-time tweets and perusing the manuscript at my leisure. To listen to any politician posture, prevaricate, lie and use hypercoached self-conscious hand gestures in real-time, well, it calls to mind the line from Adventureland:
Hey, do you have an ice-pick I can jam into my ears?
I can’t listen to this song again
Three days after its initial posting, this article on the front page of the local paper’s Web site STILL carries the headline “MAYBERRY UNDER SEIGE: Ramped-up debate security gives Danville new look, feel.”
Well, that’s one way of putting it, and that’s one way to spell siege, for that matter. Does anybody notice these things but me?
A local resident “said it’s been a bit disconcerting to watch as ‘Centre [College, the host of the Debate] is starting to look like an armed camp.'”
“A lot of people are concerned about road closures and things like that, and maybe feel like they’re in prison a little bit,” quoth the local chief of police.
It’s all about the new look and feel….
I don’t want to be totally tedious and continue to write about our choices, or lack thereof, in the upcoming national elections. To summarize: yes, Romney is one of those politicians who will say absolutely anything for a short-term advantage, and I would be incredibly sad to see him in the Oval Office.
But it is also true that in most important respects, Obama offers a slightly more incremental version of Romney’s lunacy, and shares in the collective delusion in Washington that the first thing to “fix” in a near Depression is the deficit, and that the only way to do that is to cut back “entitlements” because in an era when the rich have NEVER HAD IT SO GOOOD, it still pisses the very rich off that the parasitic 97 percent feels entitled to reassurance that they won’t starve to death.
“I’m not going to SLASH social security. Just tweak it. Does that make the cat food taste better?”
Oh, and I should mention this excellent piece by Kevin Baker, written in the wake of Obama’s nonperformance in the first presidential debate. Yes, writes Baker, there will be excuses offered,
Yet all of these personalized, psychological apologetics merely underscore the essential disconnect between the leadership of the Democratic party and its base. The leadership is now filled almost exclusively with careerists, who have no real goals they want to accomplish beyond their own advancement, and who actively don’t want to pursue any of the liberal ideas they pretend to support.
They don’t sound like they believe what they’re saying . . . because they don’t believe what they’re saying.
Neither does Mitt Romney, but he was able to put on a convincing act last night, visibly gaining confidence and command with each sally. By the end of the night, he seemed to have channeled not only Ronald Reagan’s genial manner and poise but even his voice.
Romney and his advisers displayed a sleight-of-hand beyond anything I thought them capable of. In Romney’s reach back toward the center in the debate, he had to lie almost incessantly, breezily denying most of the things he has been advocating in almost two years of campaigning.
So, until the first Tuesday in November, I will try not to post anything new about politics. I encourage all to follow the esteemed voices on my blogroll, and vote for the candidate of your choice. Or not. Do what you gotta do.
And WASSUP?, something I wrote a while back, is pretty much where I’m coming from, still. Oh, yes, we do have a choice, provided we accept what the parties agree upon:
War(s)
Austerity
Surveillance
Secrecy
Underemployment
Prisons
I would only add that there are a few important things I missed, and they are covered ably by Bruce Dixon in The Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On.