GOP debate creating drama out of nothing

this piece, while credited to CBS is really lifted from slate. it occurred to me while doing my cut-and-paste routine that we could rearrange the letters of the latter and come up with a more apt name: stale.

for nothing could be more pooped-out and meaningless than these craven and grasping pols wrangling with each other over who can put the screws most amicably to the american working class -- whether that will be mitt or rick. and so it begins:

GOP race turns intense as Perry, Romney tussle - Political Hotsheet - CBS News: "Going into Rick Perry's first presidential debate the question was whether he would play it safe or shoot from the hip. He did neither. He used both hands and took careful aim. He went after Mitt Romney for his jobs record, Ron Paul for his lack of support for Ronald Reagan, Karl Rove for being over the top, Dick Cheney for defending the bankrupt Social Security system, and President Obama for being everything from a big-government meddler to an "abject liar."

The Republican race has suddenly gotten intense and exciting. Tonight's debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., revealed disagreements -- some ideological, some personal -- about how to fix health care, the talents required to revive the economy, and the best way to transform Social Security."

nothing about the cadre blowhards and losers engenders even the most minuscule stirrings of interest from the run of humanity trying to pull itself out of the morass of contemporary life in the USA. we've been buried by all the happy talk of politicians for a generation or more, and now that the chickens have come home to roost, it's going to take more than any of these numbskulls can muster to motivate and excite the comatose masses.

they are looking for a savior, their white knight to ride up triumphantly and put all their miseries away as deftly as mama puts socks in the drawer. no one is thinking of sacrifice, or any rational exit strategy from the collective clusterfuck where our mutual indifference has at long last delivered us.

so this debate, let's call it what it was: a cockfight. nobody but malformed brutes without a callous disregard for the boundaries of taste and civilized behavior can swallow or follow the charade that's being staged and promoted as the great exercise in democracy and the public's will in action that it will be celebrated as when the curtain goes down.

and when it arises again, the same people who run the show now will be running it then. so why bother?