Remember when you were a kid and did something wrong and got totally busted by your parents? And even though you knew you were wrong, you could never, ever admit to it so when the parents came down on you, you'd kind of plead away, getting increasingly more desperate as the confrontation went on? And how you just kept on flailing, throwing everything out there in case something stuck, knowing full well nothing would?

That's how the President sounded during Friday night's debate- a whiny, desperate teenager who got caught throwing a beer bash. Not very attractive if you ask me. In fact, I thought it was such a rout I switched over from the debate to MTV to watch the "Making of: Team America" a movie whose obviousness in seeing should be apparent in all (puppet sex!). The President looked so bad at certain points that at one point during the debate I was wondering whether Bush was purposely doing some sort of rope-a-dope strategy, thinking to lure Kerry into such a state of over-confidence that he would drop his guard a bit and go back to being flip-flopp-y and drone-y. Which kind of happened. Kerry got so over-confident he made a few half-hearted attempts at jokes, which he should never, under any circumstances, try to do.

Of course, by the end of the debate, it appeared that the rope-a-dope strategy might have worked as the punditry class all praised the President for not being as bad as he was during the first debate. Which isn't really saying much now is it? In fact, some of them even thought Bush won just because he didn't totally make a jackass out of himself. Once again, we come to the fact that the President seems to be graded on a different curve than most people, that if he strings more than a few sentences together and doesn't look like he's about to throw a temper tantrum, he's praised. Dude's been President for three and a half years. Dude's leader of the Free World. Isn't it about time we start judging him as such? I mean the guy had a question about the Supreme Court and says he doesn't want to have a Supreme Court that supports the Dred Scott case. Shouldn't the President of the United States be expected to name a Supreme Court case other than one that was passed over a hundred and fifty years ago? Is coming out against slavery really a bold move? He even got the particulars of the decision wrong.

Which brings up one of the big things about the debates, how they're "scored" by the pundits. After each debate, all the pundits start talking about things like "tone" or "look". They're being graded on presentation, as if it was a Beauty School Pageant. It's so prevalent that when you listen to those "Man in the Street" type bits with supposed undecided voters, they all start sounding like pundits themselves, talking about how each candidate seemed. Everyone's a pundit these days. But the one thing they always never actually talk about is what they said. Like if they're lying through their teeth.

Which brings us to the Vice-Presidential debate. Afterwards, everyone was pretty much saying the same sort of thing about Cheney- "wow, what presence! What command! What knowledge!" As far as I know, with the exception of maybe one or two Talking Heads, nobody pointed that commanding, knowledgeable Cheney was lying through his teeth. And we're not even talking about the "who are you? I've never seen you in my life" lie. I'm talking about the "tell people Al Queda and Iraq were in cahoots with each other? Who Me?" thing or even the "only 50% of the troops are American because you keep on forgetting about all the unemployed Iraqi's we've given a gun too and told them to go save their country" thing. But it doesn't matter that Cheney was lying because, gosh darnit, he looked so commanding doing it. Even after admitting that Cheney was lying about never meeting Edwards, Chris Mathews was still talking up that little bit, saying how effective it was. Even if it was total B.S. Hello?

Yes, the press does have their little "Fact Check" section, which usually, in an effort to remain "balanced" always ends with the something like "while Cheney lied about Saddam Hussein being responsible for 9/11, having WMD's, and him marrying Britney Spears, John Edwards was also misleading when he stated that the deficit would be 5.3 trillion dollars when according to the non-partisan "Superfriends Think-Tank League" the deficit will be only 5.1 trillion. So you can see, both candidates were slippery with the truth." But still. When pressed on the issue of how these lies keep on getting repeated without anyone calling them on it, the press just usually shrugs it's collective shoulders and says "well, the Republicans are much better at it." Which, if you follow to it's logical conclusion, means that the press is basically admitting that the Republicans keep on winning elections because they lie and are okay with it.

Wake up white people, wake up....