Presidential Debates: To Light Torches, or Torch the Lighters?

October 2, 2012 5

http://youtu.be/BSTQmqO3BJ8

Presidential Debates: To Light Torches, or Torch the Lighters?
©2012 Mike Church

For Washington’s Inaugural Address, click here!

At the start of every Olympic Games there is a torch lighting ceremony featuring a torch that has been carried around the planet by various athletes and dignitaries. The ceremony makes the start of the olympic games official and adds some aura of tradition as well. At the start of tomorrow night’s “debate” between Mitt Romney & President Obama there will be no torch lighting to start the festivities but there could well be a a wide angle shot of the torching the political class has visited on our once vaunted republic and its traditions.

That these 3 upcoming events are called debates is a joke, seeing as how there will be no mano y mano of Position A vs the retort of Position B, allowing each argument to be fully espoused instead of the useless interruptions of bells, dongs and red lights. A real debate would feature any politician of any party arguing for the merits of the political class and their non-profit promoters arguing for the relocation of capital – from your wallet to their “tax collector accounts” – vs the [r]epublican principle of leaving most of the monies in the hands of those who earned it, forcing them to, as my friend the author Mark Steyn likes to say “buy your own damned health care” or any other citizen function now sequestered by the government.

This is not how it was to be. At the very start of our little experiment in self government, the first of our Presidents-George Washington- threw himself before the Almighty and laid out the meager goals of our government under the Constitution “I resort once more to the benign parent of the human race, that since he has been pleased to favour the American people, with dispositions for deciding…on a form of Government, for the security of their Union, and the advancement of their happiness… the wise measures on which the success of this Government must depend.”

Instead, we will hear consultant tested platitudes about a “vision for America”, a vision that currently looks to be hampered by a set of pirate sized eye patches. It is intriguing to note the way in which we view the Presidency today before watching these “debates”, that he is more Nanny than occasional leader. More King than wise [r]epublican. That is a reflection on the people’s lack of character in our civic affairs from which our Nanny in chief is chosen and a debate “winner” crowned.