What "Debates?"

What "Debates?"
Posted by Butler Shaffer on December 10, 2011 12:10 PM

One of the cable news channels is trying to convince me that there will be a Republican presidential debate tonight. These periodic shows are not debates, but auditions. Would-be stars and starlets get up on the stage not to impress voters - who will have little say in selecting the next White House sock puppet - but the show's producers (i.e., the institutional establishment owners) who keep the boobeoisie buying tickets every four years. The owners want to find out which candidate can most readily recite the lines of the script they seek to perform; who can best appeal to the emotions and sentiments of audiences; who can look and sound "presidential," so as to assure Boobus that his fate, and that of his family, are directed by the whims of one they can trust!

Ron Paul is anathema to the institutional owners for one reason: he wants to change the script!  He insists on doing what the established order has so carefully trained Boobus not to do, namely, to question the entire arrangement by which control of his life has been usurped.  While Newt Grinch continues to dreg up from the depths of his dark side his most arrogant and sneering qualities - traits that would serve well the leader of a war-loving empire - Ron is asking people to (gulp!) think about the moral and social implications of what we are doing.

The recent refusal of the Republican Jewish Coalition to allow Ron Paul to join other GOP candidates as a speaker, was but the latest example of his being systematically excluded from any discussion of governmental policies. As Jon Stewart so correctly labeled this decision, inviting Ron might have turned the entire program into a, . . . well, a debate.

A question that comes to mind is this: why isn't the Democratic Party also having candidate debates for 2012?  The answer, I believe, does not lie in some universal popularity of Barack Obama among Democrats, many of whom are quite critical of his presidency.  The explanation is to be found in the fact that Obama is the established occupant of the seat of power. As  the treatment of Ron Paul shows, there is nothing that the institutional owners fear more than that members of the boobeoisie might begin questioning - and (gasp!) rejecting - established power interests.