Take a look at the screen shot below of the NBCnews.com video link to the segment produced by Alex Stambaugh. Sandwiched in between a candy ad, and prompts for further glimpses into our insane world is an attempt to characterize current politics as the semi adult, semi adolescent, behavior of high school kids.
Lets forget for the moment that, when such young people do stupid things, it is, in large part, because they have a human, higher brain functionality, not fully realized yet; even as the lower brain pumps out hormones as a part of ages old survival strategies. Our political system as been going for quite a long time now (at least in human terms), as well as the social/economic framework within which it functions. The question you ought to be asking yourself is this: Which is the more ludicrous, a political system now described glibly as being no better than the product of semi adults, or the facile consumption of bad commentary within the plea for even worse consumption; all of it engineered to be brightly engaging and entertaining. None of it, however, even remotely resorting to asking the deeper question of why we would want to continue with this comprehensive farce, which, make no mistake, is both the presentation as well as the insanity presented.
In my opinion, what ought to be making you very angry, is that this segment does no more than a wink and a nudge, nudge, at the infantile behavior of political stage players as they prance about trying to portray the other guy as the fool, all the while crying about their inability to fully control the larger electronic staging.
They do get to control quite of bit of it of course, in these preliminary rounds of auditioning, and marketing research, so as to package the product with the best balance of demographic resonations. The problem is that the real advertising money doesn't kick in till you're down to the semi-finals, where the negative packaging can really start to get the voters all worked up over. We then get then get one side voting against the other side precisely because of the semi-truths, and the outright lies. At which point it doesn't really matter what any candidate says they may or may not do. One or the other will get elected and the realities of where we are now will be ignored, for the most part, as they have been, as each side tries to play to their base, while not pissing off Big Money too much.
On and on this goes, with much the same rhetoric, and about the only thing that changes, as we all buy into it again, is that things just seem to get crazier and more insane. It's all entertaining though by golly, and as distracting as hell.
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