Posts Tagged ‘winner’

I stayed up last night to watch this presidential debate. I thought it was a failure on all points, first and foremost because of the debating formula that was used. There was a guy asking the most bland of all questions and there were two guys allowed to spit out pre-studied speeches. The failure here is clear: there should be a third independant party present that can ask tough questions, not just some old man who reads questions from a paper a 7 year old boy could have thought up.

The US largely is a mytholomanic country: it operates on the presumption that if one repeats a lie often enough and with enough conviction it sooner or later becomes a truth. Both candidates essentially have the same policies, one wants to put more soldiers into Afghanistan for-this-reason and the other one wants to put more soldiers into Afghanistan for-that-reason. Nobody present to ask any tough questions, such as why Russia is supposedly evil for responding when its soldiers were attacked by Georgia but for us its okay to occupy two countries on the other end of the world for more than 8 years.

Frankly, I see very little difference between these candidates. Both try to be hawkish warmongers that want to attack people based on nothing but a fable, both are idiotic enough to suppose that we should expand Nato right to the Russian border, both are talking about giant tax cuts in a time where the US is completely bankrupt and both want to spend more on the military too.

It’s not hard to see that which such candidates the US is pretty much doomed. What we have here are two people who claim that more spending is the answer to enormous debt. They both want to give 700 Billion dollars to the banks and, guess what, on top of that want to introduce tax cuts for the tax payers. Well, that is pretty brilliant. So where is all that money going to come from again?

What we essentially see here is that elections have become a marketing event without any real difference of opinion. The basic solution both have to everything is: more war & more spending & less tax will solve everything. Obama totally blew the little credential he had left with me when he mindlessly repeated several blatant lies and even tried to be more hawkish than McCain was over Pakistan. How can anyone in the same breath be a finger pointing moralist about Russia and publicly exclaim we should attack Pakistan whenever we want if we see reason for it. The same old mindless propaganda, repeated over and over again and the worst thing is it will probably end up in our history books, because, as Mark Twain wrote once: history is nothing but our prejudices written down with blood. Both these candidates are essentially proponents of the ‘Might is Right’ doctrine: it is enough to have powerful convictions, we, the public, don’t need reasons anymore. We don’t need reasons as to why the Nato should be expanded, we don’t need reasons as to why the Taliban must be ‘stamped out’. It’s enough to hear some lunatics say with great conviction that we should. That’s what politics has come to the last decade, and sadly Europe is sheepishly following in its trails.