looking at your ugly shape what are you talking for (pt 1)
It should be obvious by now that the debates - for lack of a better term - are less important news events than rituals in a cult of political personality. Much like other heavily orchestrated media events - say for instance, the oscars - they get in-between the public and the medium, rather than inform or instruct them.
The media has been wholly complicit in this hustle, concentrating on the zing ("There you go again!"), and just how twitchy a candidate can get (Al Gore's sighs or Richard Nixon's nervous and greasy visage) or in a more general sense, how well a candidate might "perform," and if they score "hits" - that is to say, how cool they keep it and how well, if at all, they get the other guy flustered.
That said, there are some things that you could glean from the President's first outing last Thursday in Coral Gables, and the VP's sit-down with Senator John Edwards Tuesday night in Cleveland. And, again, that said, they aren't necessarily instructive or revealing, but they do show just what happens when a body goes has to breathe the air outside a media-enabled bubble: In each of these, well, whatever they are, Bush and the supposedly unflappable Cheney were almost immediately forced to confront someone else who was disagreeing with them (often only just a little bit), and in public even.
It showed, and to say the very least it was not pretty watching the two most powerful grown-ups in the universe flare their nostrils and gnaw furiously on their bottom lips while other people very mildly explained that they might - just might - be wrong about this and that.
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