omgwtf!

I’m listening to a Tom Brokaw interview. He’s talking about moderating the second presidential debate last week. During the conversation, he’s mentioned that when working with the candidates to arrange the debate it was a tricky thing to get both camps to agree to follow-up questions from Brokaw himself. Brokaw insisted on being able to ask follow-ups because he thought it was important to have the ability to question the candidates further on topics that really matter. The candidates balked at that.

In fact, both campaigns balked at just about everything. They want to control the entire debate and leave nothing up to anyone else. They approach debate organizers with a list of rules and state that those are the rules theyre going to follow, and then the organizers have to argue with them that that’s not how debates work.

This is not news to me; it shouldn’t be news to anyone who follows politics and isnt hopelessly naive. The question is, though, one that has repeatedly struck me and many others: Why is this acceptable? Why is it so acceptable to us that we have candidates that will not talk about the real issues, refuse to answer questions on issues that really matter? Why is negative campaigning permitted? Why are outright lies permitted – not just at rallies but in television ads and printed propaganda?

Why are we content to allow these candidates to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lie and slander their opponents while kids are using ratty 25-year-old textbooks in ramshackle classrooms that are really just little more than broken-down trailers in parking lots, when so many high school graduates can barely read or write, when there are millions of hungry and homeless people – and hundreds of thousands more soon-to-be-needlessly-homeless people wandering around about one-half step from suicide, when almost a third of this country has no health insurance, when there are so many things that those utterly wasted millions can do to help people?

My guy is Barack Obama. I think that he’ll make a good president. I have my fantasies that he’ll be a great president, but at this rate I’ll settle for just good. If we get an un-filibusterable Democratic majority in the House and Senate, we’ll have a real chance to do something good to counteract the last eight years of appalling. He’s done shit I dont agree with – what the fuck was he thinking with FISA, I dont know – but he’s not a hate-mongering asshole, and that’s more than you can say for the McCain / Palin crowd. I sent him a few bucks a few months ago – the first time I’ve donated to a presidential campaign in many years.

But should he or anyone else be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this campaign? Fucking NO. This should be against the law. If nobody in this country was hurting or hungry, if we had no better use for the money, then sure, do what you want. If everyone in this country was taken care of, then what the hell? You can’t take it with you, right? But the idea of all this money being spent – flowing like a river – and the banks collapsing all around us, nobody can go to the fucking doctor, student aid being slashed, shelters and social services disappearing left and right, how anyone can stomach this is beyond my capacity for understanding.

And the thought that these same candidates – the people who want to run this country in the name of every last one of us – want to be able to get the job without answering questions? No. This is unacceptable, and I do not understand why more people are not livid with rage over this fucking bullshit now. I just dont understand it, and I never will.

Our political system is completely broken. It’s out of control, and we’ve taken to accepting corrupt businessmen and criminals as our leaders because nobody else can raise enough money to challenge them.

And people laugh at me when I tell them that this is the beginning of the decline of the American empire. Heh.