I’m the kind of person who gets wound up over the State of the Union Address like it were the Super Bowl, but both these debates bored the life out of me. I was looking at the clock and whishing for it to be over. I blame it on the Senate: it’s too insular a world. When Senator McCain said that he had written a letter to the Treasury Secretary that Senator Obama had not signed, that he whishes we could see that letter, I was one impressed customer. You wrote a letter. I’ll bet the Treasury Secretary wound up the entire department and wrote one back. God! If the next president would just write a letter to Wall Street or to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I’ll bet they would write letters back too.

And John McCain’s jokes were such insufferable stinkers. His stilted humor is the perfect analog to his person. And what was up with that bizarre attack on Tom Brokaw?

And where is the Barack Obama of the prepared statements? Take away rehearsal and he’s just another quibbling, rambling Senator lost in the shuffle. In the last debate when he stammered for what seemed like two or three minutes trying to get out the name of that thing we did with those other countries about those big bombs I couldn’t believe it. “The Nuclear … uh … uh … Proliferation … uh … Agreement.” It’s a treaty. What’s so hard about that?

Tom Brokaw was a dud of a moderator. Where the hell did he dig up that completely arbitrary non sequitur about holding Congress to a two year deadline to reform Social Security? Why not the proverbial first hundred days?

People who say that one candidate or the other won are either spin-meisters or possessed of higher levels of discernment than me. I think that these debates are completely inconsequential for the outcome a month from now.