I don't watch debates.

In point of fact, I don't follow politics much at all.  I scan the headlines once or twice a day, to see what's going on in the world, but that's about it.  My viewpoints are pretty well established, so it's not like I'm in need of much persuasion.  And I don't really talk with people about politics anymore, so it's not like I'm going to do much persuading.  Therefore, I just ignore it whenever possible.

Last night, it was impossible to ignore the fact that there was a presidential debate.  It was easy enough to ignore the debate, mind you.  I just watched the Tigers wrap up their season and then read some of the news articles reacting to Cabrera's Triple Crown.  The inevitable MVP debate began almost immediately as well, so I was interested to hear some of the perspectives on that.

So ignoring the debate was no problem at all.  Ignoring the fact that there was a debate - different story entirely.  I have an e-mail address that is probably on every spam mailing list known to mankind.  I've been using it since the very early days of free e-mail and I've registered for hundreds of websites with it.  So it comes as no surprise that I was bombarded last night with pre-debate and post-debate spam.  Basically there were Republican and/or conservative groups claiming that Romney whipped the shit out of Obama, then there were Democrat and/or liberal groups claiming that Obama would do better next time.

Nobody thinks Obama won, apparently.  That's quite unusual, according to my experience with these things.  There's always a parade of Baghdad Bobs out there saying that their guy was awesome, even when wasn't.  If there are people praising Obama's performance from last night, I haven't seen them.  Based on an unscientific poll of last night's and this morning's spam e-mail, I'd say it looks like Obama must have been pretty damned bad.

There were three different spammers who hit me with the following video this morning.


It's only something like 30 seconds long, so I watched it.  As it played the first time, I wasn't sure whom the ad was supporting.  It looked like it was probably a Romney ad about taking charge or whatever, but it didn't seem to have a coherent point.  Then, at the end, it had the bit about being paid for by the Democrats.  So I guess "Romney is a bully" is about the best they can do at this point.  Like I said earlier, apparently Obama didn't have a good debate.  But the link from my e-mail had taken me to breitbart.tv or something like that.  Democrats wouldn't have sent me there.

I went back to my e-mail inbox and found that the spam message was from one of those "grassroots" conservative groups.  You know the ones - raising money through donations and then paying salaries to a few dozen people who just spam the shit out of anybody who may have ever held a conservative point of view about anything.  Yeah, it was one of those.

There was another spam message from some sort of Catholic pro-life outfit, talking about other parts of the debate.  I assume that they are still pissed about that Sebelius/Obamacare debacle.  I didn't read the whole e-mail.  I did notice that they also linked to the Breitbart story about this ad though.  Sort of a non sequitur with respect to their mission, it seemed, but I guess everybody likes to make fun of clueless political operatives.  Whoever produced this ad was pretty damned clueless.

Which brings us to the third spam message.  The third group to send me a link to this video was some sort of union activism outfit.  Since I signed up with the Teamsters, I get all kinds of that stuff.  They started with the standard bit about how Romney will kill every job in America by the end of February.  Then they included a link to this same DNC video.  This link was to a YouTube version hosted by DemRapidResponse.  The thing only had something like 300 views when I clicked on it.

In browsing around under that DemRapidResponse account on YouTube and then the main democrats.org stuff, I can't find any mention of this ad.  If I'm being told by conservative groups that I should watch a DNC ad, and I'm being told by at least one liberal group that I should watch a DNC ad, then why doesn't the DNC seem to want to acknowledge that the ad exists?  It's all just really weird.

And so is the ad.  Really weird.  The president has to deal with the reputation that he's an effete pansy every time Putin spits in his face or the ChiComs tell him where to stick it, so I don't understand why his supporters would produce an ad that reinforces this reputation.  You lost a debate.  BFD.  Live to fight another day.  Don't rush out there and produce an ad that makes the other guy look like a more assertive leader.