Thoughts on the final debate {#4} [GUEST POST]

Last night was the Presidential foreign policy debate. It was completely uneventful. Today, I was going to post my musings on the final debate of this Presidential election (as I have for Debates 1, 2, and 3) . But, I realized last night I’m tired of the politics. Believe it or not, I am. Prepare for my comments on this stuff to become fewer from now through election day.  I’ve pretty much said what I need to say. So, instead, I wanted to post the take-aways of a friend of mine, Nikita Hamilton, a Ph.D. student in Communications at USC’s Annenberg School. But first, I’ll only make three quick observations:

• Iran does not pose an imminent, existential threat to either America or Israel (and Israel knows it). The sanctions, instead, are killing Iranians and making them more angry with the U.S. rather than spurring on some revolution there. The world’s saber-rattling only spurs on Iran’s nuclear protectionism. Of course they want a bomb! They are more at existential risk from others in the world than anyone is from them. Also, even if they got a nuclear weapon: what would they do with it? They know that the second it’s employed, they would be “wiped off the map”. It’s defensive. And we’ve created the environment where they feel like they need to be that way.
• Romney’s final statement (which he repeated twice–no accident under pressure here) that “American is the hope of the earth”. Says more about the naiveté, hollowness, and failure of our nation’s foreign policy than anything the two of them have said in this entire campaign.
• My roommate pointed out (and Wikipedia confirmed) that in high-end ties with diagonal stripes, you can tell where the tie was made based on the direction of the stripes. In the first, domestic policy debate, Romney wore an American-made tie. In this foreign policy debate, he wore a European tie (see picture above). That Romney may have actually put this much thought into this says a lot about him.

Okay, on to Nikita’s comments!

Presidential Debate #3 Take-Aways:

1. We don’t need horses and bayonets anymore because we have unicorns *BOOM* (::sings:: 2 Become 1 by the Spice Girls)

2. America doesn’t dictate, it liberates as it infiltrates, reappropriates and occasionally annihilates.

3. We all love teachers. It’s paying them and making our expectations for them reasonable that we don’t love.

4. Russia has taken a swig of vodka, put on its ushanka, and is coming for us.

5. Airbrushing is the move, both for history and tanning.

6. The synonym for foreign policy is “domestic policy.” Who knew?

7. Mittens met unemployed people and that trauma caused his Romnesia.

8. The moderator has a purple binder full of the inability to take control.

9. Ann needs Michelle’s hairdresser #laid #shine

10. Safety and prosperity are a number one priority for Mittens… as long as it’s abroad.

Bonus: Syria is NOT Iran’s gateway to the sea because Iran has its own gateway: its coastline

Bonus #2: Game, Battleships.

[image credit: Eric Gay/AP, from the Washington Post]

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