Weird theatre

I watched the two men debate and kept thinking, isn't this supposed to be over now?

They're really so alike that there's very little difference.

As a correspondent from Portland noted: The standard answer for any question? Tax cut! Immigration? Tax cut! Energy? Tax cut. Foreign policy? Tax cut!

The man who's the slightly better man than the other, who seems more interested in the world I'm interested in than the other seems and who would make wiser Supreme Court appointments gets my vote, I suppose.

But then again he wanted the job so badly the first time and said things he probably shouldn't have said, in retrospect, to get it. He hasn't acted like he said he'd act, he hasn't performed as he said he'd perform.

But then again, I can't vote for the other.

Later, watching people on television who are paid or otherwise incentivized to try to either make sense of what just happened or to tell other people what they should think of what just happened, I wondered what Plato or Voltaire or Twain would have made of the spectacle rather than David Plouffe or Gov. Bobby Jindal.

However, it's quite possible that even a great mind wouldn't have been able to make much of so little, and that I was hoping for too much reassurance from the past.

Thinking of the debate as theatre helped a little: that the two characters on stage (minus the moderator) are actually sleight variations of one another, one casting an infinitesimally longer shadow than the other and therefore slightly less preferable.