The Elitist

And you thought the CNN debates were bad.

This entire debate was almost entirely consumed by tired, stupid horse-race talking points. Now, I realize that 90% of politics also consists of stupid, horse-race talking points, but this was especially infuriating for two reasons.

1. This is a primary debate in which one candidate is all but mathematically eliminated, while the other has historically shown higher-than-average approval ratings among independent voters.

2. If you haven’t noticed, everything’s not all peachy-keen and hunky-dory out there right now. The current administration has strip-mined civil liberties, destroyed the economy, and drowned any respect we had among our world neighbors like it was a 6-week-old kitten. This is not the time to talk about flag pins or Reverends or Bosnian field trips with Sinbad.

While much of the mudslinging, by both the candidates and the moderators, was in Obama’s direction, and while Clinton was complicit in the two-hour attempted hack job that this debate was, the real loser–the real entity that we, here, should be demanding to have strung up, tarred, feathered, and quartered–is ABC News (especially George and Charlie, your friendly fair-and-balanced moderators,) and also, to a certain extent, the rest of the media.

While I’d have to check my notes, the only policy discussions I can actually remember from the debate are both candidates agreeing to leave Iraq, a scuffle involving payroll taxes on a range of people, namely those between “I make a lot more than most people” and “I make a shitload more than most people,” and some inane crap regarding gas prices, which, as we know, are completely set by Presidential edict and not subject to fluctuations due to retardedly disastrous foreign interventionism.

We sat through at least 45 minutes of pure, unadulterated, 24-karat bullshit before the moderators even attempted to touch the surface of anything that could be remotely described as policy.

The worst part is this: not only was ABC completely derelict in any sort of duty to the American public to hold a fair debate–in fact, they’re even tape delaying it for west coast viewers, like it was a two-hour episode of Dancing With The Stars–the FCC, which is supposed to dole out public radio spectrum privileges in return for their licensees’ commitment to servicing the public, has done nothing to ensure that the public receives what it deserves from granting such power.

Or, perhaps, the public is getting exactly what it deserves, since we’re the ones who have stood by while the steamroller of media deregulation continues to repeatedly drive back and forth over the corpse of respectable journalism.