Anything you can do I can do worse

'Wretched Debate With Almost No Redeeming Qualities'

"...if there is one thing the 2008 campaign should have permanently taught, it is that campaign rhetoric often bears little relationship to what a person will do once empowered."

"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Macbeth  (Act V, Scene V).

First of all, I'll be candid in the interest of full disclosure.  Or whatever you wish to call it.  I think Mitt Romney is a proctologist's dream.  I am not sure whether that would be a nightmare or a wet dream, but he is centered in that area of medical specialty.

The three so-called debates between the presidential candidates have informed us of only one thing.  1984 has come.  America is now a populace of mindless automatons whose lives are monitored and ruled by what is emitted from computer monitors,  television screens, and phones that have the only smarts in their lives.  Their minds have been conditioned  over the years by corporate messaging to the point that they have no notion of what  comprises a fact, an act of reasoning, or a moment of informed, coherent thought.

Dana Milbank says, "Not too long ago, the wire services, broadcast networks and newspapers covered major political events differently. Each outlet had its own take and tidbits. But now everybody is operating off the same script and, except for a few ideological outliers, the product is homogenous."  That's a nice way of saying that we have all become a bunch of idiots whose only mental  capabiiity is to repeat phrases sent into our brains through the electronic media.  

In 1984, the government is what devised and administered the brain washing.  For us, it is corporate capitalism, the one percent, whose only human motive is greed.  They aren't any smarter than the rest of us.  They are just greedier.  But the instrument of control that monitors and controls the minds of the populace is the same one depicted by Orwell in 1984, with exactly the same process.  

How else do you think we've reached the point where a Sarah Palin could run for vice president and Mitt Romney could run for president?  Her foreign policy expertise was spying on Russia from her house and Romney's was mapping a route through Syria for Iran to get to the sea.  

The first debate was one that showed a befuddled Obama.  He prepared for a debate, not a belligerence display borrowed from Jerry Springer.  If anyone actually listened to what he said, he had some cogent, fact-based things to say.  But that is not what America wanted.  Led by the MSNBC pompom squad, America chanted that it wanted a real fight, a shouting brawl full of menace and insults with a few funny lines thrown in.  Obama's advisers told him that to win elections, you have to give the people what they want.  So then, for the next few debates Obama came with a menacing glare and some Don Rickles put-down lines, and he performed.  And the moderators acted like referees and they did not intrude when the brawl really got going.  Turns out Barack Obama is a really good brawler and jive mouth.  But he has an edge.  He is half African and half American, and that makes him an African-American who knows how to slice up a honkey ass.  

MSNBC and the American people got what they wanted.  The problem is that Obama could not let go of facts and serious stuff like that and really mix it up with Mittens.  

These spectacles of verbal brawling are not debates.  They are Jerry Springer shows.  They allow the contestants to avoid any real questions that a legitimate format for discussing policy would present.  A moderator could ask Obama things like:

• Why haven't you closed Guantanamo and what do you plan to do about it?
•  Why are you allowing the government to  spy on its own citizens under the guise of the Patriot Act.
• You have any thoughts about global warming?

Those are just for starters.

According to the polls, Romney has been creeping up and has a chance to be elected president.  He is a CEO, and brain-washed, behavior-conditioned people actually like the bluff and bluster of a CEO.  Or anyone else as brainless as they are.   They may get what they deserve.

The rest of us, we outliers, may have to follow Obama back to Kenya.  America is no country for brain cells.