withdrawing without withdrawing...,
2004-09-28 11:48:02
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Bush mocks Kerry...,
2004-09-29 14:20:49
the most important presidential debates since 1960!:
oh my! Maybe they mean this one? Audiences will be some fifty odd percent of the 80 million who watched the debates in 1980. There are fifty odd million more Americans now than there were in 1980, and 4 or 5 more news channels on which to watch it. Truly the democracy has never been in better shape.
A prediction - in the vein of projecting the election to be settled in the courts on the basis of a frivolous lawsuit - which is to say predicting the very, very obvious: the highly televised, barely watched presidential joint press conference this thursday will be the biggest sham the partisan Commission on the Presidential Debates has ever pulled off, which is saying a lot considering what they've pulled off in the past. This year they have 32 pages of boiler plate in the partisan Memoranda of Understanding to prevent a debate from happening, signed by the campaigns and the joint press conference "moderators".
By all appearances they really don't want you to watch, and just in case you do watch they make sure that you won't actually have watched anything. Highly scripted, highly manipulated, the makeup will be perfect - if it isn't the winner shall be declared by default, no actual ideas will be debated or so much as mentioned, and the candidates will not deign to talk to one another like normal, civillized people.
This would be a good thing considering that they are not civillized people - they are Western politicians - except that we, or rather our courts, will end up "electing" one of the lizards. You don't want the wrong lizard to get in.
To prevent humans from interfering in the process three stilted, ancient bone-white lizards - reknowned for their abilities to turn human brains into meaningless goo by the utterance of inane platitudes - have been selected to moderate should any of the humans involved have a malfunction.
The decision on the victor will go to the lizard that makes the unseemly gaffe in an uncharacteristic fashion. Because almost all unseemly gaffes are characteristic of Bush he will come out the victor unless Kerry fails to provide any unseemly gaffes at all excepting one: the gaffe that appeals to the starving jackyls waiting in the wings for the post-debate debate on which lizard crossed the finish line first. The jackyls, howling for the blood the campaigns have so far denied them, will inevitably have to fault Kerry for being so wooden as to provide no gaffes at all, so to claim victory he must find the perfect gaffe to appease them, the Gaffe of the Disarmingly Natural that Is Niether Naturally Contemptuous Nor Disarmingly Ambivalent.
Flat out lies and false promises, according to the 32 page agreement from the partisan Commission on the Presidential Debates, are to go uncontested by anybody, and re-inforced by those who want to keep their think tank funding.
