Things like debates have gotten so meta. There's more talk of meta than of substance. Sure the debates are theater, and sure these days you can (though why should you have to? there's a debate to watch!) click on a candidate website which gives you some policy information, but "we've" already spent a couple of weeks talking about the expectations game, and the game to game the expectations game, and the game to game the gaming of the expectations game, all of which is about impacting the post-debate pronouncements of pundits, who are making career choices themselves with these pronouncements. CNN has approximately 87 people on stage whose job it is to argue about what we're supposed to think about the thing we watched 5 seconds ago based on arbitrary standards they cooked up 10 seconds ago. One of them should say "fuck this" and throw down the mic, but, hey, people gotta eat.
