Tuesday 11 October 2016

What can be learned from such a spectacle? [updated] #debate

 

I was fascinated to hear the myriad of reactions to yesterday’s “debate” between the two aspiring presidential lizards.

I’ve heard everyone discuss everything about the “debate” as a boxing match, as a horse race, as a battle of focus groups, as a forum on misogyny and “rape culture,” as a pugilistic fight-to-the-political death in which to either embarrass each other or threaten incarceration.

Sounds like it was a “debate” unlike any the republic has ever seen before. But beyond the spectacle, what did anyone actually learn?

The viewing audience would undoubtedly have heard chapter and verse from each lizard about about why they were dewdrops and rainbows and how it’s the other lizard that is the disgusting jerk. And they would both be be 100% right about the latter, and completely wrong about the former.

But do we know any more about the programme of either lizard? About what either one would actually do once they hold (what in their reptilian mind is) absolute power ? About their actual policies?

From the “debate” transcripts: no. Not a whiff of it.

Because what these two lizards want from the electorate isn’t agreement on something as oufee as policies. What they each want is a blank cheque. In their mind at least, the winner gets to draw that cheque on the most powerful political/military apparatus the world has ever seen.

And whatever you think you’ve learned about each one so far, it’s then their real character will emerge.

Power tends to corrupt.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

What do you think it would do to a soul already as corrupt as these two?

And what might that do to all of us?

NB: Here’s a factcheck. And here’s a debate transcript. If I get time, or you do, I might pull out the haltingly few policy points that were raised…

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UPDATE: Here’s another transcript of the two at war yesterday. Unlike the genuine transcript this one is genuinely intended to be satire.

Meanwhile, the two mainstream parties debate nude men and penises. True story.

Meanhile

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