You will rarely hear those people saying why Obama's "failure" should be so, other than stuff such as he was "passive," and he kept his eyes directed downward too much.   What on that stage was so splendid that it merited the President's steady attention?   Surely not M. Romney's strangely glossy, red-eyed, blustering aspect.   But the most common criticism is that the President failed to do what they, his attackers, say they would have done, in his place.
     That strikes me as being a very simple-minded and even dangerous line of attack, first because none of them are anywhere near being in his shoes and can't really know what it's like.  Also none of them have managed to accomplish anything near the incredible miracle that this man managed to pull off a few years ago and that was completely unprecedented in American history, namely managing not only to be elected the U.S. President, an accomplishment so rare that only about a dozen men ever get to occupy that office during the average American's lifetime, but also doing so while being that otherwise most hideous of beings, a male nigra!  Gott im Himmel!
       So I would think that, as uncomfortable as many Americans are with giving a man of color credit for having any smarts at all, no matter who he is, B. Obama's ways of conducting himself and his tactics should always be given great respect and a lot of pause, as unfathomable as they may be at times.   He has the successes to demand that.   From Day Before One he has had to fight hard just about every day and also almost single-handedly it sometimes seemed (going by the scarcity of reports about what his allies were doing, compared to how often you heard about him), against an army of Repubs, all aching to bring him down no matter what the cost to the country's well-being.   Yet he and the country are still very much afloat.   --Such a man should never be sold short.
     This widespread complicity in buying the ridiculous reminds me of what you hear all the time about bombing Iran.   Even those who are against that idea will still support other measures to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but seldom if ever will they give even a halfway reasonable justification for why that needs doing..    And do you know why?   It's because no such justification exists.
     Iran is a sovereign nation, just like Britain, the U.S., or Israel, only with considerably less blood on its hands -- scarcely any, in fact, relatively speaking -- and there is no good reason why Iran shouldn't be left alone to do whatever they please and can manage, to defend themselves.   And with someone like B. Netanyahu running around loose in its neighborhood like a raving, yapping pit bull, Iran definitely needs some nukes, for their normal and only feasible use -- the  beating of the national chest, gorilla-style.
     Meanwhile the three nations that I just mentioned have long had nuclear weapons coming out of their ears, yet they have the effrontery to tell Iran, a nation of 68,000,000 normal, dues-paying, hard-working people, nearly nine times as many as Israel can boast and about as many as Britain, not to mention much more contiguous territory and that most valued of all natural resources, oil, that it can't have any such lethal goodies.   And almost never does anyone question those powers about this all too obvious hyoocrisy.   Instead people just follow the "party" line, or what could better be called, the "thoughtless line."
      We can see the same thing at work in the chatter about that first debate.    Maybe those who haven't really thought about this and have accepted that verdict that Romney won and Obama lost as good coin are going by the principle that the popular perception is that Romney won because he was loud and assertive, and Obama was neither, and so the "Presidential disaster" bit must be true.   But my question is, how can it be true?   By what standards is Romney perceived as having outdone Obama?  On what basis are the winners and losers of debates even determined?   How are the points counted and what are they?
     Debates are highly subjective things.  The final verdicts on them are just matters of opinion and little else.   No matter how the media would have it, debates are not like contests such as basketball, football, or baseball, where you end up with baskets, touchdowns, or runs that can be tallied.  Debates are not even like their closer relatives, chess and prizefighting.   In chess the winner is very clear.   It's the player who has forced his opponent's king into a position where that king is in check and it can't get out of check.   In prizefighting, where the pugilists openly go for inflicting maximum physical damage, admittedly things get no better than in debates on those unsatisfactory occasions when so little damage has been inflicted that the winner has to be determined by referees and judges instead of by the ways for which that bogus "sport" is most often loved and revered -- a knockout punch or an opponent so battered and bleeding that he can no longer get back off the floor or the ropes.
      By contrast Obama ended up far from being unable to move out of check or to get off the canvas or the ropes (that he was never on to start with).   Instead the very next day, visibly unbattered and not bleeding in any way, he made a magnificent speech in Denver just as if he had never been anywhere near the likes of M. Romney in that same city the night before.   And the next day 30,000 admirers flooded a campus in Wisconsin, with more thousands in the outlying areas, to hear him speak, and the day after that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the national unemployment percentage had dropped to 7.8, its lowest number since the newly inaugurated Obama was obliged to begin his term in office by trying to do away with  the enormous economic quagmire that had been left to him by the Republicans.   Yet now, not even four years later, far too many Americans, out of little more than undying resentment of his skin color, are ready and willing to let that same party take right back over again, even though GOPers created that mess in the first place and thereafter bitterly resisted every measure that Obama tried to take to turn things in better directions.
      If nothing will do nevertheless than having a scoreboard and tallying something,  then merely the number of lies told by the two sides should be as good a basis as any for saying who wins a debate, and I think you will find any number of articles enumerating Romney's lies, while there are few if any mentions of falsehoods told by Obama.   In fact, in this respect Romney can be thought of as having at least performed a valuable service, by making his lies so numerous, egregious, and easy to spot.   That would settle the question of who won or lost this debate right there, and the winner wouldn't be Rmoney, by a truly lopsided margin.
      But if that is conveniently set aside to keep the popular fallacy, the hoodwinking, and the lemming march going, then the standard must instead be the amount of wolfing that was done.   But is that what a political debate is supposed to be, especially in a Presidential race?   A wolfing contest, with the winner determined by seeing which contestant dished out the most bullpoop in a limited amount of time, a tactic also known as doing the "Gish Gallop?"   Then by that criteria Romney surely won.  But in that case it wouldn't have been a debate at all, that is, a contest of ideas and facts, but instead would be only a one-sided shouting match or a poop-shoveling competition,  with Romney's bullpoop having been by far the most toxic and noxious because it was so soaked with falsehoods, aka lies.
      The standard that I like most, however, and the one that I would think would be the most important when you are choosing a U.S.  President, because it pertains to so many matters,  is which person would you prefer having access to the likes of the famous nuclear "suitcase?"   Which person takes time to look  before he leaps?   Which person has a better feeling for the world beyond his several houses, his boats, his car elevators, and his huge bank accounts?
      During any big emergency, not just of nuclear war but also of any disaster that calls for Presidential leadership and assistance, would you want that leader to be cool, calm, and unflappable, as Obama has demonstrated time and time again that he surely is?   Or would you prefer the person who shows up at a mere debate so intent on deluding people with an impression of his being the one with the biggest stick, that his appearance and behavior suggest that he dropped something potent on his way there, and who comes across as being extremely hyper, with his performance consisting mainly of torrents of verbiage delivered with little or no semblance of careful, consistent thought behind them.   And Romney ended up descending to being absolutely picayune and mean-spirited when, after having a few months earlier said that he likes to fire people, he threatened the moderator of this debate, the venerable Jim Lehrer, with termination, by being unable to resist sounding an old Republican war cry that in this case was the same as saying, Oh, and by the way, Jim ol' snort, I will make sure that the U.S. government will no longer give funding to one of the country's finest cultural achievements, your PBS.   I want to give that drop-in-a-bucket money to my people instead, the already filthy rich.   They might not need it in the least, but they definitely want it, and that's all that matters, at least to me.
       Romney's general demeanor was the clincher for my contention that he, not Obama, was the big loser in their first debate, in more ways than one.   He resorted to schoolyard-type bullying, complete with cutting off Obama several times and Jim Lehrer repeatedly, as if he himself, the big cheese on that stage, was setting the rules for the occasion then and there.  (He must've struggled mightily to avoid calling the President "Boy.")   But maybe this is why so much of a nation that takes such great pride in being the one so-called "superpower" and therefore superior to all others in the world thinks that Romney won.  Haven't they heard of the dangers of hubris, or overweening pride?   But I guess not many Americans take Classics or the Humanities in college  though that should be required reading everywhere.   Believe it or not, the Greeks figured all this out as many as 3,000 years ago, yet today here we are, with people going for that same old disastrous red-eyed dodge yet again, the same as in countless times in the past and in countless places around the world.
      All that I could observe Romney accomplishing during those sad two hours is that, figuratively speaking, he exposed the vast expanse of his behind, by sticking it out a window of his blood-red bus and thereby mooning the country that he nevertheless thinks is obliged to choose him in less than a month from now as its next chief executive.
     If people do not know when they're being mooned, or if they enjoy being subjected to an experience like that, it's time for them to take some long walks through the woods and get themselves together, right now, while swearing off the "Kick Ass Joy Juice."
    (I apologize for the length of this diary, if you got this far, but that is what happens when you make a person wait for a week before he can post his first diary ever, as this one is.  :)  )