Robert Rendo, a National Board Certified Teacher who often comments, posted these remarks:

You know, I’m a public school teacher, and I watched the debates, and they had a veritable tone and texture of something I could not quite put my finger on, but now I finally have.

I finally see that the debates took on the tenor of a hybrid between a reality show and American Idol, where each contestant had a swagger and self promoting, self-absorbed aura, and each judge was snarky and “gotcha” instead of provocative and fact finding. Each judge would lunch a torpedo at the contestant and the contestant would launch a bigger one back to the judge and/or to an opponent. It became a sport of sardonic badminton, with acidic, self aggrandizing and self congratulatory remarks as the shuttlecock.

There were smirks, grins, chuckles, and sarcastic rolling of the eyes. There was pivoting of the head side to side to indicate disapproval and raised eyebrows to show defensiveness.

There were myriad retorts from the Mr. cheap-shot-and-shinily-packaged Moliere himself, Donald Trump, and there were startling confessions about abortion from Scott Walker, who has always put women in a metaphorical state of being buried up to the neck and stoned. This was indicated unabashedly by the ultra-chauvinistic Walker, whose own wife he would seemingly have die in order to give birth to a baby that would put her life at grave risk. Or, heaven forbid, if Walker’s wife were brutally raped and had horrible memories and neurosis from the experience, Walker, according to his own principles, would still make her give birth to the ensuing and permanent reminder.

Walker said at one point before these debates that he is prepared to sign into law a 20-week abortion ban without any exceptions for victims of rape or incest, arguing that women are concerned with those issues “in the initial months” of pregnancy.

I guess he would know since he is a man.

Walker is the picture-perfect poster boy for the mediocrity American culture has raised as its highest level of expression: moronic, simple minded, very well funded, political connected, masterfully deceptive, and vested in state authority.

My point is that these candidates are frightening, incompetent, narcissistic, oligarchical, and just plain off-the-wall-crazy.
Between Rand Paul proudly declaring that the GOP has worked hard for over a decade to oppose a single payer healthcare system and Donald Trump asserting, pre-debate, to Cher that he has no rug atop his head, that “It’s the real thing”, and that he pledges not to discuss her “numerous unsuccessful plastic surgeries”, I could not help but think that this debate was an ultimate symbol for the disconnect between the average American person and the plutocrats who live and work in an Super PAC tower.

There was therefore nothing amusing about the debates, even if they read like a snarky stand up comedy competition.

There are tens of millions of people in this country who are suffering horribly.

People are saddled with higher education debt, never able to buy a home, sick and dying as a result of lack of access to Obamacare in which the compulsory insurance policies do not cover a condition or the premiums have shot up, stuck with their kids in once-excellent public schools that have been starved of legitimate funding and reduced to a skeletal staff, and dumbed down by the paucity of real journalism, that is now controlled by corporate agendas and bought media. People are under the oppression
of bad medicine, adulterated food, long work hours that lead to no promotion and stagnant wages, and the maintenance of instrastructral services that the very rich also depend on but don’t pay for, such as roads, bridges, tunnels, energy, and public transportation.

The GOP debate had almost no dignity and even less truth to it. These debaters are bonafide looney, dangerous, and disconnected, no differently than had been Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who lived isolated and opulent lives in grand palaces and who eventually faced a fate our current politicians might one day face, according to Picketty.

How could I not vote for Sanders?