Malfunctioning Marcobot defends American speshulness

[Tracy Riddle]

I put this in the Lounge because that's where American Presidential politics is today.
This is funny and sad on so many levels. It terrifies right-wingers that we might have to grow up and stop acting like a hyperactive, adolescent neighborhood bully, and that it's not "all about us," and we're not the "AWESOME!" special snowflakes we think we are.

[Drew Phipps]

Let's pretend that a pair of billionaire brothers are not only trying to buy the election, but are trying to plant selected memes in the electorate that they believe with ultimately serve their interests. It would be in the interests of these totally hypothetical billionaire brothers to control multiple candidates in a broad field whose messages are substantively similar but superficially different. That frames the argument in such a way that sound bites score points, but more fundamental issues are obscured. For instance, everyone is arguing whether the pig is wearing a pink-colored dress, or fuschia-colored dress, instead of asking the question why the pig has a dress on in the first place? (In the context of this election, for instance, they're not asking the Republicans who has the better long term plan to deal with, say, global warming, or the 11 million soon-to-be-fugitive undocumented immigrant population.)

If that is the case, then Rubio would be properly spouting his particular flavor of bile, as opposed to malfunctioning, and the only surprising fact was that this public attack on his message came from Christie, instead of Trump or Kasich, but I suppose that that particular bit of theater could have been deliberately stage managed as well, to prevent a more scathing broadside from someone who could have scored bigger from it.

[Tracy Riddle]

Oh, it's all theater, of course, but they could give them some better lines (and more of them, so they don't have to repeat the few they have so often).