UGC Week: The Presidential Debates

I tried to come up with an interesting take on the presidential debates, but really, there’s nothing to say that hasn’t already been said. It was exactly like watching the end of The Matrix, when Neo comes back from the dead and wrecks those three Agents without even trying. And it should be pretty obvious that John McCain is those Agents.

The thing that slays me about McCain is that he’s spent eight bitter years recovering from the character assassination that Bush laid on him in 2000, yet he now finds himself in the ironic position of acting like Bush’s fresh-faced sole male heir waiting to move into the castle with his exotic princess from the unexplored hinterlands from a policy perspective and laying out the exact same character assassination tactics that he spent eight years kvetching about to try and bring down Obama. Except we remember McCain’s rhetoric about running a clean campaign just a few months ago and we very unfortunately remember his shameful admission that he’d compromised his principles to get votes the last time he was a serious presidential candidate - which was the exact moment that a younger, much more conservative Jeff stopped respecting him.

Yeah, I know everyone does it, but confessing it is the worse crime when it comes to politics; moreso than Gossip Girl or Heroes or House, we want our leadership to sell us on its pleasant, pleasant fiction. In the past, I’ve told people that I don’t understand why Europeans are obsessed with their royals, but that is the answer - it’s like having network dramas without needing to watch TV. It’s a proto-ARG that engages our desire to have something vaguely related to a personal stake in government. To feel like our vote has weight. This is the same feeling that was ripped from the breast of so many DC faithfuls when Jason Todd came back a few years ago, by the way.

So, the debates. The debates were boring as hell, simply because none of the moderators wanted to actually make the participants answer the questions being asked of them. Instead, McCain and Palin each took the opportunity to reach out to their base in the ugliest way possible, by reminding them that the opposition was dangerous and couldn’t be trusted, and while I’ve heard scads of Republicans say that the rampant Obama-hate in their red-state ranks isn’t due to race, but the stump speech crowds and the diarists in the blogsphere and the talk radio die-hards can’t resist attacking on that front - so while I’ve never claimed that all Reps are racists, it’s pretty obvious that racism is a motivator on the right. And McCain, in the debates and in the ads, has been playing it up and then telling everyone to calm down. Which led to the Dems spending most of their energy on damage control and spin defense instead of really getting into talking about the issues. Hell, looking back at the second debate, Obama had to spend over his allotted time debunking McCain’s batshit assertion that Obama wants to start a Bush Doctrine-style war on Pakistan.

So that’s where I am on the debates - they’re a wonderful way to expose our bread-and-circuses hypocrisy but they have no real political value and I’m also jaded as all hell about everything.