Thank God, No More Debates

One has to wonder how many “undecided voters” had their minds made up by that “debate” last night. I actually wonder how many “undecided voters” at this point are even capable of making up their minds, or even have minds. They will almost certainly go to the polls and pull a lever based on the most recent tv commercial they saw while watching “Two And A Half Men.”

Romney played the theme of aiming for “world peace through strength” while Obama led off by saying that he ended the war in Iraq. So one is modeling Reagan and the other is taking credit for the one positive gain made by Bush. Amusingly, Romney accused Obama of trying to keep troops in Iraq longer, and Obama claimed he had done nothing of the sort, once again screaming for transcripts (of what was unclear), and that it was Romney who’d said we should do that.

The moderator didn’t bail him out with any transcripts this time, and “fact checkers” always let that one slide, never mentioning that Obama removed the troops from Iraq on precisely the schedule set by George Bush before he left office, or that he tried to negotiate with al-Maliki for a SOFA to keep them there longer but failed. And, of course, he is negotiating with Karzai to keep troops in Afghanistan past 2014 as we speak.

Schieffer asked, “How do you see America’s role in the world?” and both Obama and Romney launched into a discussion of leading the way on climate change. Oh wait, that was a dream I had last week. I’m into irrational fantasy in my dreams.

Obama was quick with a lot of clever quips like, “1980 is calling and wants its foreign policy back,” which is a lot of fun and displays how witty he is, but doesn’t say much about his own foreign policy positions. Perhaps he thought he was still at the Adam Smith dinner. It was based on these put downs that claims are made that he won the debate, which would be valid if he were auditioning for the Comedy Club rather than for President of The United States of America.

For a debate that was supposed to be on foreign policy, there was a great deal of lengthy discussion on education, jobs, deficit and the debt which the potted plant who occasionally asked questions allowed to continue unabated. He did at one point observe that “we all love teachers” before asking the next question. Both guys know that, other than “who will be the biggest bad ass in the Middle East,” voters don’t give a damn about foreign policy and kept steering the discussion back to issues where they could score some of those lovely “undecided votes.”

News flash, your flapping gums aren’t going to do that at this point. Those “undecideds” are going to walk into the booth still undecided, and even after they vote they aren’t going to know why they voted for who they voted for.

Yes, I know who I’m going to vote for and it isn’t either one of these two power hungry idiots. I live in California, so my vote is irrelevant, but I’m voting for Rocky Anderson.