scroll to the middle of the article to see McCains monkey face.
That aside, I was disappointed by Obama inability to effectively counter the right wing framing of issues spewed by McCain.
When McCain accused Obama of "excessive spending" - Obama should have pointed out that nobody talks about "excessive spending" when families buy expensive homes and gadgets to improve what they see as quality of thier lives, or when businesses buy new facilities and technologies to expand and imprive what the see as quality of thier services - but then we sudenly talk about "excessive spending: when we talk about governmetn trying to improve the quality of its services it its citizens. This right wing canard, based on visceral hatred of the gummin't is easy to "deconstruct" and rebutt - but Obama failed to do so. Instead he seemed to accept the right wind framing of the issue and went on the defensive of his talking point.
When McCain started trolling about Acorn as the gretest fraud in the history of the United States - Obama could have responded with various lines, for example pointing oput that larger electoral frauds were committed by the Repugs cf. purging voter lists based on false records. He also could have pointed out that ACORN is a respectable organization working to empower disfranchised people and thier slight of hand in voter registration is really small potatoes vis a vis the other goo9d things they do. That was basically Mccain response when Obama mentiond about wingnuts on his rallies - he called them resopectable veterans, military heroes and similar bullshit and making only a parenthetical remarks about some fring eelements. Obama, by contrast, said only that a few ACORN workers falsified records, without oputting that into the context of the good works that ACORN does.
In short, the presidential debates indicate the utter idiocy of the Amercan political discourse and by implication of a large share of the American electorate. As my signature line elegantly puts it, these are mobs of men capable of reponding only to the most primitive slanders and invectives. Perhaps these trolls are a numerical minority, but they clearly define the tone of public discourse in this country. Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------