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So we all know that the President throws out the first pitch here and there at such and such a significant baseball game … but if I were President I would want to throw out the last pitch: Bottom of the ninth, my team leading by one run (say, 4 to 3), and the bases are loaded; two outs; full count. I’m going to strike this batter out with this next pitch, and save this game, or I’m going to walk in the tying run. The field is populated with offense and defense just as in a real game situation, and I am in uniform. I would do this every year of my term, and it would make me the most popular President in history next to FDR. Why go to the mound in a lousy warm-up jacket to throw out the first pitch when you can stand there in uniform, everybody going nuts, the game on the line, and throw out the last pitch? Who’s gonna say no to the President?

May I reiterate? That was one shitty excuse for a debate.

Excerpts from the Alternet article on last night’s Obama-McCain thingy:

Liliana Segura:

The first problem with this debate was calling it a debate. The second was calling it a “town hall.” In the strange, stilted ritual atop the red carpet at Nashville’s Belmont University, the studio audience looked less like an inquisitive cross-section of the American public than it did a cast of apolitical drones programmed to deliver canned questions in exchange for canned lines. This was mostly thanks to the rules. The two candidates were literally, according to guidelines agreed upon by the two campaigns, prohibited from addressing each other directly. The result was an hour and a half of parallel speechifying in which disagreements were expressed in terse, passive-aggressive sideswipes by two men who, as McCain might say, clearly “don’t like each other very much.” In such a format, meaningful discussion — or even entertaining television — is fairly impossible.

Joshua Holland:

These debates are becoming increasingly banal. In a sense, they’re a microcosm of our larger political discourse, with complex issues of great import reduced to meaningless rhetoric and a media — personified by moderator Tom Brokaw, who appeared more concerned with enforcing the rules of the debate than probing the issues in any substantive way — that refuse to call out the candidates when their talking points diverge from reality.