Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
If every other story on my Flipboard and News apps are to be believed, apparently the first presidential debate of this election season is tonight. Already every major news outlet seems to have a breakdown of what to look for, what Hillary needs to do to win, what Trump needs to do to win, who’s going to be sitting where and all sorts of theorizing about how this is the most important presidential debate in history. Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be boycotting the NFL for tolerating the free speech rights of some of its employees, or something; which is annoying as it is Monday night. And, I’ve got both Ingram and Snead going for me on my undefeated fantasy team. Plus, season six of The Walking Dead just hit Netflix. So, whatever I’m watching tonight, it won’t be the debate.
Atlanta at New Orleans isn’t a terribly compelling matchup, at least not to me, other than for fantasy implications – my opponent has Freeman and Sanu. Paying attention to the stats of four players when 22 are on the field at any one time will be a lot more interesting than anything Trump or Clinton has to say.
At this point, in this election cycle, I don’t even see the point of having a debate between Trump and Clinton. Are there seriously any undecided voters out there? Is there anyone really “sitting on the fence” between two of the most polarizing candidates in history? I doubt it. So, again, what is the point of having two materially similar candidates rehash their talking points in front of an electorate that has already made its mind up; even if many of them have made up their minds to just stay home election night?
Trump will talk about building a wall, stop-and-frisk, making America “great again,” and a bunch of other empty nonsense. Hillary will talk about her “experience” and “leadership” and will make vague pronouncements about making Obummercare “even better.” She may even pledge to support more doomed-to-fail gun control legislation.
Whatever either of them says tonight won’t be any different than anything we’ve heard them say already. This campaign has already been going on since, what now? 1996? Something like that anyway. There’s nothing new either of these two can trot out now that will be appointment viewing. And, if you don’t watch it live, you can bet the 24-hour news networks will be using carefully edited snippets of it for the next few weeks, so, it’ll be almost unavoidable in any event.
However, if you’re like me and do try to keep abreast of what’s going on, even when it involves people you can’t stand/don’t care about and feel compelled to watch the debate, I have some advice. First: don’t. You don’t have to. It’s 2016, we have the internet. When it comes to things like debates and state of the union addresses, someone always transcribes them and puts said transcription up on the internet, usually pretty quickly. And, the ones put out by news outlets tend to be pretty close to verbatim. I personally love transcriptions; hell, I haven’t watched a state of the union address live since 2002ish. One of the great things about transcripts is that the obnoxious, seemingly scripted breaks for applause that go on for several minutes at a time are recorded simply as “(applause),” and then you can just move right on to the next sentence of empty promises and bullshit. In the case of tonight’s debate, the shrill, grating, demonic timbre of the Hildabeast’s voice cannot offend the ear via the printed word, so, that’s another point for transcripts there.
So, tonight I’ll be watching football and not really hoping any one team wins, just mainly hoping Sanu and Freeman don’t have huge nights; which is better than watching a debate between two people and rooting for both of them to lose.
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