EXTRA: Aaaughh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They may be on bubble-gun cards ...

I have to confess; I barely made it through about 10 minutes of the first presidential debate that took place Monday night.

I couldn’t take any more. The shouting at each other by the two candidates that seemed like the point was to drown out the opposition more than anything else.
 
THAT, AND DONALD Trump insisting that his “facts” were really factual, and that it’s the real world that somehow has it wrong. It all came across as such nonsense. I turned away.

... and think of selves as super-important, ...

I actually lasted a few minutes before changing the channel, then tried again about a half-hour later. Only to find I lasted even less time the second time around. Even though a part of me wanted to do the political equivalent of eating all my spinach, I couldn’t do it.

Part of it is that while I have found it interesting when I, as a reporter-type person, covered debates in person, watching them on television just seems so deadly dull.

They come across less as a real-live political discussion and more like staged hysteria. Particularly when you get blowhards like Trump and Hillary Clinton.

IT LITERALLY REMINDED me of that 1993 interview that late-night talk show host David Letterman did with conservative ideologue radio personality Rush Limbaugh and asked him, “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think to yourself, ‘I am just full of hot gas’?”

 

... but Carlos Sanchez was more thrilling!

I had to wind up reading the early news reports, and probably will check out some additional ones Tuesday morning, to figure out what – if anything – was said. Although I really suspect it was nothing of substance.

So what did I wind up doing? The equivalent of eating my dessert without finishing all my vegetables. I caught part of an “Everybody Loves Raymond” re-run (Marie found out that Raymond had a party in her house back when he was a teenager) and several innings of the Chicago White Sox’ victory over the Tampa Bay Rays.

Trust me. Home runs by Justin Morneau and Carlos Sanchez were more thrilling than anything that spewed from the lips of the Donald or Hillary, while debate moderator Lester Holt probably wondered to himself, “What did I do to deserve this?”

  -30-