On "Debates"

So the latest kerfuffle in Canada's most pointedly unnecessary and useless of elections is over the debates. The leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May, was told that she wouldn't be invited to participate. Meanwhile, both Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff are openly lying about wanting to have one of their own, excluding the NDP and Bloc Quebecois.

As for me, I'm left here wondering why anyone even gives a shit. Political debates aren't actually "debates," at least not as the term is commonly understood. An actual debate is where you build a case for or against something. Televised political debates (at least in North America) are nothing more than exercises of glorified used car salesmen treating us like even bigger idiots than we already are for 60 seconds at a time. I defy any of you to cite the last time that you learned anything at all from a televised campaign debate, let alone changed your mind about something substantive based on what you heard in one. Actually, can you quote anything that was said in the last nationally televised debate in your country? I can't, and I've wasted my entire life studying this nonsense.

Here's a great example of what I'm talking about. In October 2008, my American then-girlfriend and I were staying in a hotel in downtown Toronto. One night we watched Sarah Palin and Joe Biden try to out-stupid one another. The next night, we watched the Canadian federal leaders debate. The only substantive difference was that my guys did it in French, which impressed the girlfriend endlessly, but is sort of beside the point.

This is because they aren't actually debates. They're beauty contests with exceptionally ugly people as contestants. In that they are designed to solely reward anti-intellectual emotional appeals and ignore the very existence of reasoned argument, they're really no different than American Idol. Yes, I watch them, but only because I enjoy knowing the true extent to which the very idea of democracy is being fucked over by their inability to tell the truth, our inability to care, and the media's inability to even notice. Debates are a great way of learning that.

Modern debates date back to the 1960 U.S presidential election, when John F. Kennedy basically revealed everything that he learned in his classified CIA briefings and forced Richard Nixon to lie about it to protect national security. And 1960 was the high point of televised political debates.

A candidate doesn't even have to be smart to participate anymore. Shit, being half-retarded is actually considered a potential advantage. That began when Ronald Reagan didn't die in his sleep during the 1984 debates, and the rule of "beating expectations" was firmly embedded in the process. Shit, he picked up 22 states just from telling a joke. Nowadays, if George W. Bush or Sarah Palin can get through two hours without actually drooling on themselves themselves, they are thought to have "won" because they have "beaten expectations." In large part, this is why modern candidates go out their way to make themselves look stupid.

Policies don't count for shit. Look at 1988 for proof of that. Michael Dukakis, for whatever reason, was asked if he would abandon his opposition to the death penalty if his wife was raped and murdered. He lost that debate by explaining his position, instead of kicking Bernard Shaw in the balls or something. And nobody bothered pointing out that it was an incredibly stupid question, since no federal prisoners had been executed in several decades at that point, making the issue wholly irrelevant to the presidency. George H.W Bush, the last adult president the United States has had, was sent directly to hell in 1992 for looking at his fucking watch and being confused by some idiot woman's mangled question about the deficit affecting his personal life.

None of that shit has anything at all to do with running a country. I know this might come as a shock to some of you, but it doesn't. It doesn't even make for interesting soap opreas. Okay, Bill Clinton's personal life did, but that was notably left out of any of the debates he took part in.

Canadian debates are even worse, if only because they lack the high drama and superior production values of those in the U.S. We decided as a country that our politicians don't need 37 flags surrounding them, mostly because our flag is pretty cheesy-looking. The last debate moment that anybody in this country remembers at all was Brian Mulroney's "You had an option, Sir" tantrum. And for the record, that was 27 years and eight  (although it feels like forty) elections ago.

Being slightly more mature than our American cousins, we judge who won our debates in a more mature way: By watching to see who blinks and twitches the least when they're lying to us. Oh, and being really patronizing when they're doing it really doesn't hurt them, either.

And when it's all over, we're subjected to three hours of even more patronizing horseshit from every body's jerk-off spin doctors and "political analysts," who want to tell us all "what it means" even though we just watched the whole fucking thing ourselves.  There's one secret that the journalistic class shares with the political one - they all think we're stupid. Actually, that's not true. They know we're stupid.

The worst part is that the Goddamned Liberal Media lets this happen. They bitch constantly about how vacuous and empty everything about these debates are, but they run the show. They let the parties set the rules and pick the fucking moderator, leaving them with the shitty jobs of paying for the intellectual blight and trying to sell it to the rest of us as somehow meaning something.

You know what would be really nice? If the broadcasters all got together and said to the parties, "Here are the debate dates, here are the locations, here's your moderator, and here are the rules. Show up or don't." There would be no negotiation with the politicians. At all. And if a given leader doesn't show up, the moderator begins the program by listing each and every trivial objection that he or she listed as a reason for not going. If you bailed because you didn't get to stand on a goddamned phone book, the great Steve Paikin tells us that, and we decide how we feel about it.

Oh, and the networks would all agree that there would be no fucking post-game show, where they tell us what they think happened. You know what? The fact that you went to journalism school doesn't make you all that impressive. And if the parties want their spin doctors - perhaps the most useless assholes of the media age - on television, they can buy commercial time like everybody else.

No debates at all would be better than the farce that we get now.

But I guess that I should be telling you what I think about the events in the first paragraph, huh?

Look, I don't think that Elizabeth May is any more of a tool than the other leaders, but I don't think she's any less of one, either. Sure, her ideas are half-crazed and her chances of ever winning a seat are lower than mine are, but that's not the objection the other party leaders have. They want more camera time to themselves to lie to you.

As for Harper and Ignatieff; well, it took this country 135 years to find the worst whores that could possibly represent us, but I think we've finally done it, y'know, at least until Justin Trudeau and Jason Kenney get their day in the sun.

As much fun as it would be to watch, a two-man debate between those demented curs is never going to happen.

First, the media aren't going to exclude two parties that, between them, represent well over a quarter of all voters. The combined polling of the NDP and Bloc Quebecois now beats the Liberals, and by a pretty healthy margin at that. Also, they might sue to be involved, and they'll almost certainly win. Excluding the Greens, who would have a fantastic election if they won five seats is one thing. Excluding the NDP and the Block, who have around seventy between them right now, is quite another. Why not say Ignatieff can't come, since there's almost no mathematical way he can win a majority, and probably won't even have a job in five weeks?

Besides, this election is really about a Harper Minority vs. a Harper Majority. Why bother pretending otherwise and just let him debate himself all night? We might actually learn something from that.

Second, neither Ignatieff or Harper actually wants it to happen. A one-on-one debate means that one of them might actually be sleazy enough to clearly win a debate, which necessarily means that the other one loses. These are both temperamentally very conservative fellows and neither has made a career out of taking dumb risks. I don't expect them to start now.

One or both of them will find an excuse to cancel it. I'm betting on the no-standing-on-a-phone-book rule.

And the fact that anyone at all cares about this proves virtually I've said in this post.