Quick take: RIP, presidential debates? If so, good riddance.

 I wrote a long-form post yesterday.  I was irate, so I wrote.  What do you do?  Drive angry?  Consume unhealthy substances?  I write.  Regardless, I have one brief observation for today.  The RNC has announced that they are ordering candidates not to participate in debates sponsored by the Commission.  And I'd just like to say... hurray!  "Debates" are falsely advertised.  They are not true Scotsmen debates.  They are soundbite vs. soundbite, and when Trump is on stage, they are even less.  They have never served a purpose because there is no part of the job of being president that resembles the task of debating, nor even "debating."  It is as though a law firm interviewed candidates by handing them violins and asking them to play the Brandenburg Concertos as part of the interview process, not because the job involves the violin, but just because they've always had a violin portion of the interview process.  Candidates ignore the questions in the best of times, give prepared speeches and "zingers" written in advance by their staff, programmed automatons that they are, and the events never matter unless someone has a Rick Perry "oops" moment, but really, who cares?  End these.  Forever.  The greatest debate in American political history was not Lincoln-Douglas.  No, it was the second Biden-Trump debate.  Because that one didn't happen!  I cannot recall precisely what I did that evening.  I'm boring, so I probably listened to some mid-60s jazz, read some sci-fi, then turned in early.  I'm the most boring person ever.  But you know what?  That was not only a better evening than every other presidential debate night in history, it would have taught me more about politics because as I try to demonstrate, you really can learn about politics by reading intelligently written novels.  Hell, you can learn more about politics by reading the worst schlock ever written than by watching one of those brain-draining debacles.  So cancel them!  Forever!  If a petty, childish Republican temper tantrum is what it takes to end these things forever, then let this be the rare occasion on which a Republican temper tantrum yields a positive outcome.

Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me your eyes.  (See, 'cuz you're reading, right?  Get it?)  I come to bury the presidential debates, not to praise them.  The evil that the Commission does lives after it, and there is no good to be interred with the video records, so please never watch that shit again.  So let it be.

I thought about continuing, but then I ran into a problem.  The Commission:  Caesar?  Brutus?  We're burying them, so they're Caesar, but "ambition?"  That's Trump, Marc Antony's exclamations of Brutus's honor were ironic proclamations of his villainy, and since the Commission is the villain here, I've got a problem.  The Commission can't be both Caesar and Brutus in this particular monologue.  Basically, I don't know what I'm doing.  I started without a clue where to go, so fuck it.  Just go read someone who's a good writer, i.e., not me.  I suck.

Billy could fucking write.  O judgment!  Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.  Bear with me; my heart is in the coffin there with truth/democracy/decency.  And I must pause till it come back to me.

...

Bob Brozman, "Telephone Arguing Blues."  He recorded several versions of this, and it is not my favorite, but my favorite is not on youtube.  The best is the version he recorded with Jeff Lang.  Regardless, few slide guitarists have ever been capable of playing at Brozman's level.  (Lang is among the few.)