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so far as i can tell, there is only one way that you could have assessed the debates as bush having come out of it better --if you were exclusively focussed on the type of langauge that bush was deploying to the exclusion of what kerry was doing.
in which case, there would have been no real difference between watching the debate and watching a bush commercial because all conversation would be elilminated. the debate, from that viewpoint, would be a conservative monologue.
which seems the only way that conservative ideology can hold up---people who operate within that space can only go so far in explosing their positions to scrutiny, even through conversations in places like this--when things start to get down to fundamentals (when they do) the usual move is to attempt either to relativize the whole conversation and thereby protect the internal coherence of their positions, or to launch some strange personal attack, which enables the conversation to grind to a halt and the attacker to imagine him or herself a martyr or having somehow trumped the other person by switching the situation.
i see this systematically--it is not particular to you, irate, when you indulge it (and you did not in the last post)---and it is in part because of this (which has been evident for some time) that i am starting to think contemporary conservative politics are not like politics that have preceded it--it is more self-enclosed, more self-referential--it is not oriented toward interaction with other positions because it discounts them up front---and feeds psychological requirements more than it does conventional political requirements (in other words, it is not based on a compelling description of the world, but rather on a series of normative positions that have and require no descriptive dimension).
the right has a new and quite (alarmingly) effective institutional infrastructure that is geared toward getting its premises worked into the normal operating language of the tv figures who mediate the relation of too may americans to the world. the right, and the right alone, has worked out the centrality of getting non-earmarked funding to their thinktanks---this is a fundamental prerequisite for the rest.
there is no point in trying to argue this away--it is simply factual, like it or not.
i think the effects of this system on individuals is disturbing--it seems to engender a systemic incapacity to deal with dissonance, and a tendency to retreat into the orderly world of conservative monologue as a response. i do not see how this helps anything--not american pseudo-democracy, not the ways in which participants in that pseudo-democracy understand what they are doing and why, nothing.
and i do not know what media you watched after the debate that enabled you to pretend that it was "a near-tie"--the assessment simply flies in the face of reason. the problem for the bush campaign has been trying to get out of the defeat that bush suffered there. read the times article--you will find loads of bush campaign types talking about this issue. if the campaign is forthright about the pounding bush took, why should you not be as well?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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