bman

During election time I try to watch all the televised debates for both Dems and Republicans. On Tuesday night Im watching the Republican Debates happening in South Carolina while keeping an open mind and looking for some very specific things to help me weed out the candidates.

Here's what I looked for:

Those who have fake smiles.
Those who appear to have an monetary agenda.
Those who always have rehearsed answers.
Those who look like a used car salesman.
Those who speak like career bullshitters.
Those who's responses parody a Michael Moore storyboard.
Those who claim to be better than the others because of (insert bullshit reason here).
Those who spout their unrelated qualifications.
Those who answer direct questions with direct unrelated drivel.
Those who wear more makeup than Tammy Fay Baker.

After applying my basic rules above I was able to chuck 8 of the 10 candidates within the first 10 minutes of the debates and was left with 2; Huckabee and Tancredo. "Who the hell are these guys?" I asked myself. Never heard of them before. In fact Huckabee resembles Gomer Pyle - you'd think the media would be all over this. But no.

These 2 conducted themselves very very well during the debates;in my opinion much better than the top 3 hopefuls that the media seems to favor. Surprisingly these 2 received some of the loudest applause for their answers! 2 days later and hardly anything at all has been said about anybody else but the 3 media star children: McCain, Romney, and Guiliani - none of which can pass my litmus test above.

Sadly we'll never get to hear much from Tancredo or Huckabee or perhaps other lesser known candidates on the Republican side. Likwise we'll not hear much about the lesser known Democrats when their debates get into full swing.

The media seems to pick and choose whom we should be paying attention to and that really sucks. Most Americans are lazy and will not make an effort to learn about a candidate from either side of the aisle, watch different broadcast news networks to get a broader more complete factual record. Instead they wander to the polls like sheep.