Let’s face it, American style political debates are a foray into the great black hole of the Foo Foo bird. What is the Foo Foo? The Foo Foo is a bird indigenous to Korea. It flies in ever widening concentric circles until it eventually disappears up its own asshole, splattering shit and confusion in the face of its baffled pursuers. If American political debates relied on substance, the program would be over in less than a minute. What is offered as debate should in fact be relabeled image burnishing, because we all know that candidates are never going to discuss the substantive aspects of any issue. That is all by design.

The powerful donor classes that govern our politics today will never let candidates discuss issues, and that is simply because few if any of our political leaders have either the intelligence or ability to articulate cohesive and coherent policy positions about anything. The ones that are capable of uttering a thought in complete sentences are an absolute danger to the powers to be. No, debates are about sex appeal, “appearing” presidential, eye shadow and gesticulation. Nobody cares if anyone deliberately lies or distorts the facts to make political points before the television audience. Candidates are fact checked with the speed of lightening to correct the self-serving and oftentimes false nonsense they offer as policy proscriptions for the direly critical problems facing our nation. It is too much about sound bites, gotcha moments, and personal attacks that veer off into oblivion to be worried about answering direct questions with honest, direct answers.

Parliamentary democracies have it head over heels with respect to the United States when it comes to political discussions. Prime ministers have to stand up before their respective parliamentary bodies and answer brutally tough questions about what the hell the government is or isn’t doing with respect to governing. That’s a novel concept in American politics, where the notion of accountability is becoming more and more remote. I’m no pro-Brit, but I would give anything to see a Tony Blair, or Theresa May or a Boris Johnson engage any of our political titans in an exchange of ideas. It would hardly be considered a battle of wits, as our representatives would be unarmed.