From Michael Bérubé’s website:

I teach American literature and cultural studies at Penn State University.

Somebody get Michael Bérubé a T-shirt.

Damn! And here was me planning to support Obama simply on his keystone campaign promise of Getting Back At Whitey. But he’s a communist too? This is even better.

Quite true. We people have consistently failed to understand why The People have not risen as one to endorse Obama’s proposal to abolish private property and form autonomous worker’s collectives.

yet you didn’t care when the target was a Republican.

Not true! We deplore the media’s treatment of McCain.

By the way I am also an academic, I know about “academic freedom” so you are doing nothing new. And yet, this is so far from the ideals you ostensibly espouse.

Whenever a blog comment is held in moderation, John Dewey cries.

As I believe the old saying goes, “We have no chance to survive, make our time.”

What you people at the Nation, Am Prospect and CT don’t seem to understand is that socialist ideas, much as they appear beautifully coherent and ethically uplifting to you, hold no appeal to the American people.

Over this background, you are shocked, shocked, I say, when Obama is getting the media treatment that he was spared from so far.

Candidates were being unfairly roughed up by pompous asses in the media (“the only profession without professional standards” as George Soros put it once at a conversation in Berkeley), yet you didn’t care when the target was a Republican. You only care when the Socialist icon’s honeymoon is over.

Wake up babies, and don’t cry.

PS Open letters from “concerned intellectuals” are soooo funny (in a Popular Front kind of way).

Well, why don’t you have the balls and call this blog an exercise in therapy for you and all the other inhabitants of your echo chamber?

By the way I am also an academic, I know about “academic freedom” so you are doing nothing new. And yet, this is so far from the ideals you ostensibly espouse.

Yes, we need to learn from the opposition, steady quite confidence in the rightness of our people and positions*. Whining is for losers, winners go out and fuck the prom queen poor.

*Many examples to choose from on the other side, like their stoic reticence in the face of what they perceived as attacks on General Petraeus last year.

Dang! There goes our credibility.

Stop whining! You sound like spoiled brats, which is what most lefties are, anyway.

Dang! There goes our appeal to people’s intelligence.

Oh, well. It was a good effort, everyone. But we know when we’ve been pwned.

Yes, let’s see what that paragon of “truth to power” the Annenberg Public Policy Center at Penn had to say on the debate. Well, Factcheck did have its usual little nitpicky deconstruction of the candidates’ responses, “Taking Liberties in Philadelphia: Truth is not always self-evident in the latest Clinton-Obama debate.” and the main product that Annenberg has produced is a running track of voters’ perceptions of those bugaboos of media narrative, “trustworthiness”, “judgment” etc. So they are doing there usual job of missing the forest for the trees* and being useful idiots for the right and the media in their decontextualized game of “gotcha”.

So yeah, “Not Penn State”.

*I am of course being a trifle unfair, in a world with the Hoover Institute at Stanford, the Annenberg is a relatively minor blot on its parent institution, but given the incredible dynamics in evidence in the media in the last 15 years, they have basically just sat there with their thumb up their ass.

Does the post title mean that the whole appearance of process in the debate was a smokescreen, and that the whole point of the exercise was, in fact, to metaphorically do away with ‘Bama?

(and yes, after 72 years, it’s not really a “Spoiler”, but I try)

This debate had the largest audience of any of them so far. ABC is feasting on your outrage. For a change, let’s try a discussion of what can realistically be done to make future debates more interesting and substantive, and to keep our elections in general from becoming these money sucking black holes.

Oh, and try to find a few more women to sign will you? It would look better.

uuuhh… who are you quoting here?