It wasn't just the dumb formatting of the thing, such as Jim Lehrer's cute "Say it to him!" direction reminiscent of marriage counseling. That made your skin crawl, but Lehrer is just that sort of folksy presence; he wants people to like each other. It was simply that the debate was fundamentally stupid, much as the coverage of American politics is increasingly irrelevant and dumb, ossified within jingoistic parameters that never permit an actual airing out of what we used to call Reality. And when you don't talk about reality, but simply measure who's better at arranging the stock answers as zingers! or sound-bites, you know we are actively in the process of joining our one foot in the grave with the other one.
As an example? Okay, take our departure date from Iraq. McCain says that if we don't leave with an honorable victory, "we'll have to go back." Obama says that we will be as "careful about leaving Iraq as we were careless about going in." Great, evocative lines. There's only one problem. Both of these guys need to read the news more so they'll realize that Nouri al-Maliki has been playing us for fools, using our money and our military to consolidate his own power base while he temporizes about the Status of Forces Agreement he has no intention of giving us. So when the UN Mandate expires on December 31, 2008, a little over three months from now, what is our cover story for remaining in Iraq? Even if things go to hell when we're kicked out, under what new Neocon theory of international relations would we "go back" to do as we damn well please? It would appear that Commander McQueeg's reasoning is based on the unilateralist thinking that supported the invasions of Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq '03. How could it apply to a "sovereign democracy," our bulwark of Freedom in the Middle East?
And if Obama wants to oversee an orderly withdrawal from Iraq ending in 2011 or so, what does he do about Maliki's desire to get us out much sooner for the sake of Iraqi domestic politics? It's a popular cause in Iraq now, to make the Yankees go home. The clever Maliki is already aware that Bush is trying to lengthen the occupation past the point of strict necessity in order to make American "policy" more congruent with McCain's stick-it-out campaign slogan. I suspect Maliki would like nothing better than to pull the Persian rug out from under this ploy and turn to his natural supporters, the regime in Tehran and its benefactors, Russia and China.
McCain hammered Obama on his reluctance to cut "government programs," and Lehrer, of course (like all Mainstream thinkers) never thinks to include the defense budget as one of those government programs. It is absolutely telling, in considering how empty the national discourse has become, that the single largest item of discretionary spending has achieved this sacrosanct category of The Untouchable. Listen to my former prof and current favorite voice-of-reason on the insanity of America's obsession with "security spending," Chalmers Johnson, as he notes that last week Congress passed the defense appropriation bill of about the same size as the 'bailout" without so much as a public comment:
"This is pure waste. Our annual spending on "national security" -- meaning the defense budget plus all military expenditures hidden in the budgets for the departments of Energy, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, the CIA, and numerous other places in the executive branch -- already exceeds a trillion dollars, an amount larger than that of all other national defense budgets combined. Not only was there no significant media coverage of this latest appropriation, there have been no signs of even the slightest urge to inquire into the relationship between our bloated military, our staggering weapons expenditures, our extravagantly expensive failed wars abroad, and the financial catastrophe on Wall Street."
Obama, of course, couldn't touch it. McCain bragged about his war on "cost-plus" contracting for the military, or how he canceled a redundant bomber program. That's as good as it's going to get. Lehrer is even afraid to ask the question. That's how much of a third rail the issue of defense spending is in this country. War and preparations for war have become the raison d'etre of the United States, which is the only reason a bellicose loose cannon like McCain is even taken seriously as a candidate. The national Zeitgeist allows him to sound echoes of the Cold War without being challenged; when he looks into the eyes of Putin he sees "three letters: KGB." (McCain's stock zingers are really cornball stuff.) And what three letters do the Russians see when they look into the close-set eyes of the current American President, the son of the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency? What's the point of such saber rattling, other than to hope, as McCain does, that constant provocations of Russia, such as meddling in Georgia, placing radar in "Czechoslovakia," or missiles in Poland can bring us back to those joyous days when we spent every waking minute on the edge of nuclear annihilation?
As we watch America's financial institutions take turns circling the drain and disappearing, it's worth thinking about the priorities we have set for American spending. We are a modern Sparta and it has become so ingrained, so pervasive and natural to our thinking, that it's a bit like asking fish to comment on the necessity of the ocean. Although it's bankrupting us and preventing us from spending money on anything else with a human future, we just can't stop ourselves. We can't even ask questions about it. We have to sit quietly in the living room, coffee cups poised, listening to Jim Lehrer admonish his unruly interlocutors about "relating to each other," and ignoring the ten thousand pound fire-breathing monster, covered with scales, with razor blades for eyes and machetes for claws, sitting indecorously next to us on the couch.
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