Still too wound up to sleep...
Is it just me or did Dubya look like he's gained some weight? Sparky noticed it too, in the shots from behind he looked awfully wide. Maybe because he was slumping so much... Hmmm, Randi Rhodes read off some of the 32 page list of rules last night and one of them was they couldn't photograph them from behind, makes sense now.
He also looked really freaked out that people weren't cheering after his every sentence. Didn't anyone tell him this audience hadn't signed an oath of loyalty? Does he even realize that a lot of people don't like him? If he doesn't read the newspapers perhaps he doesn't.
I kept waiting for him to either:walk off the stage, start choking or having a feigned heart attack, or shout out "I wanted to be baseball commissioner, dammit!".
Was he sedated? Maybe that's why he's gained weight. They're keeping him drugged like in the Nazi episode of Star Trek.
And poor Rudy Giuliani trying to defend Dubya's performance. It was just sad. How do these poor guys sleep at night?
I've seen some threads running tonight that claim the Democrats are manipulating the online polls, isn't that what the Republicans are good at? Aren't they supposed to be the masters of media manipulation? Oh, and voting manipulation? It's common knowledge that they plant people at Democratic rallies, feed the press negative stories, line up to call in to radio talk shows disguised as non-partisan types, etc. How on earth could we beat them at their own game? Are they all asleepl? Or are they busy banging their heads against the wall? Surely they've been revved up and ready for tonight. They sure were on the ball when 9/11 happened, they jumped right on that bandwagon without a pause.
But we've seen the end of the post 9/11 faux-patriotic momentum tonight. Americans are angry, we're tired of being manipulated and lied to. We want peace, education, health care. We want the truth. We want our country back.
Maybe Ralph Nader will be so shocked by tonight's debate he'll step down. Hopefully his supporters will at least see why we need a new President.
I hope Oprah's Voting Party got people to watch the debates. She made the audience cry, that's a good start.
I'm going to go flip through the debate transcript while my memory is fresh. OMG, there were so many good (and horrific) soundbites tonight. I wonder if they corrected Dubya's grammar, I hope not. Damn Jim Lehrer did a great job.
Whew, now that my initial reaction has been captured untinged, I've spent the evening basking in Air America and flipping through weblogs. And I've been checking out & voting in the online polls, please go and cast your opinion too and see what people really think before the spin doctors try and salvage their loss. I've made it through most of them and the consensus across the board here at 2am is Kerry 76% and Bush 24%. EVERYWHERE! Even here in Texas... it would be nice to think my vote might actually count this November. Some of the polls have Kerry winning by over 90%. Sparky is so happy, I actually showed him quite a few of the polls so he would actually believe that America is coming out of it's coma.
The only scary opinion expressed this evening is one I've worried about also, what are the powers currently in charge going to do to try and swing public opinion back in their favor? Perhaps another terrorist attack on US soil? I wouldn't put it past them, seriously. Or are they going to sell their stocks and try to get out before they start losing money in this corporation they've created? I've been imagining for some time that this whole evil empire was going to self-implode like Enron. They'll turn on each other, no one wanting to take the blame for the criminal and financial mess they've made. And tonight we've seen their sacrificial lamb - poor Dubya will be the one thrown to the wolves. And he's too dumb to defend himself. He's actually lucky that we still do have some semblance of Democracy left or he'd be dangling over the village square by a rope tonight like Mussolini, with the angry throwing rocks at him and beating him with sticks.
The last thing Sparky said before he went to sleep tonight was "now we can put our Kerry bumper stickers on our cars". So there is hope, don't let anyone tell you there isn't. Believe your own eyes and ears, let this be remembered as the day America woke up. Our country has been off course, asleep at the wheel. We can wake up and keep from hitting the brick wall, it's not too late.